Portable, mostly-concurrent, mostly-copying garbage collection for multi-processors

Abstract

Modern commodity platforms increasingly support thread-level parallelism, which must be exploited by garbage collected applications. We describe the design and implementation of a portable mostly-concurrent mostly-copying garbage collector that exhibits scalable performance on multi-processors. We characterize its performance for heap-intensive workloads on two different multiprocessor platforms, showing maximum pause times two orders of magnitude shorter than for fully stop-the-world collection at the cost of some total mutator throughput. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors—code generation, compilers, memory management (garbage collection), run-time environments