Waste not, want not: resource-based garbage collection in a shared environment

Abstract

To achieve optimal performance, garbage-collected applications must balance the sizes of their heaps dynamically. Sizing the heap too small can reduce throughput by increasing the number of garbage collections that must be performed. Too large a heap, however, can cause the system to page and drag down the overall throughput. In today's multicore, multiprocessor machines, multiple garbage-collected applications may run simultaneously. As a result, each virtual machine (VM) must adjust its memory demands to reflect not only the behavior of the application it is running, but also the behavior of the peer applications running on the system.