research-article

Towards hinted collection: annotations for decreasing garbage collector pause times

Authors:

George NeculaAuthors Info & Claims

ISMM '13: Proceedings of the 2013 international symposium on memory management

Pages 3 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/2464157.2464158

Published: 25 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Garbage collection is widely used and has largely been a boon for programmer productivity. However, traditional garbage collection is approaching both practical and theoretical performance limits. In practice, the maximum heap size and heap structure of large applications are influenced as much by garbage collector behavior as by resource availability.

We present an alternate approach to garbage collection wherein the programmer provides untrusted deallocation hints. Usage of deallocation hints is similar to trusted manual deallocation, but the consequence of an inaccurate hint is lost performance not correctness. Our hinted collector algorithm uses these hints to identify a subset of unreachable objects with both better parallel asymptotic complexity and practical performance. On some benchmarks, our prototype collector implementation achieves 10-20% pause time reductions. We close with a discussion of the design trade-offs inherent in our approach and lessons to be learned from our collector.

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Cited By

Cohen NPetrank E(2015)Data structure aware garbage collectorACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887746.275417650:11(28-40)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754176
Cohen NPetrank EHosking ABond M(2015)Data structure aware garbage collectorProceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/2754169.2754176(28-40)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2754169.2754176
Terei DAiken AVitek J(2014)M3ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775049.260299549:11(3-13)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775049.2602995
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards hinted collection: annotations for decreasing garbage collector pause times
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Dynamic compilers
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Garbage collection

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Towards hinted collection: annotations for decreasing garbage collector pause times
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Garbage collection is widely used and has largely been a boon for programmer productivity. However, traditional garbage collection is approaching both practical and theoretical performance limits. In practice, the maximum heap size and heap structure of ...

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISMM '13: Proceedings of the 2013 international symposium on memory management

June 2013

140 pages

ISBN:9781450321006

DOI:10.1145/2491894

General Chair:
Perry S. Cheng
IBM Research, USA
,
Program Chair:
Erez Petrank
Technion, Israel

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 October 2018

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ISMM '13

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SIGPLAN

ISMM '13: International Symposium on Memory Management

June 20 - 21, 2013

Washington, Seattle, USA

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ISMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 22 submissions, 50%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 72 of 156 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

Cohen NPetrank E(2015)Data structure aware garbage collectorACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887746.275417650:11(28-40)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754176
Cohen NPetrank EHosking ABond M(2015)Data structure aware garbage collectorProceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/2754169.2754176(28-40)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2754169.2754176
Terei DAiken AVitek J(2014)M3ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775049.260299549:11(3-13)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775049.2602995
Terei DAiken AVitek JGrove DGuyer S(2014)M3Proceedings of the 2014 international symposium on Memory management10.1145/2602988.2602995(3-13)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2602988.2602995

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