article

Free access

Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm

Author:

David UngarAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 9, Issue 3

Pages 157 - 167

https://doi.org/10.1145/390010.808261

Published: 25 April 1984 Publication History

Abstract

Many interactive computing environments provide automatic storage reclamation and virtual memory to ease the burden of managing storage. Unfortunately, many storage reclamation algorithms impede interaction with distracting pauses. Generation Scavenging is a reclamation algorithm that has no noticeable pauses, eliminates page faults for transient objects, compacts objects without resorting to indirection, and reclaims circular structures, in one third the time of traditional approaches.

We have incorporated Generation Scavenging in Berkeley Smalltalk(BS), our Smalltalk-80 implementation, and instrumented it to obtain performance data. We are also designing a microprocessor with hardware support for Generation Scavenging.

References

[1]

S. Baden, High Performance Storage Reclamation in an Object-Based Memory System, Master's Report, Computer Science Division, Department of E.E.C.S, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, June 9, 1982.

Digital Library

[2]

H. G. Baker, List Processing in Real Time on a Serial Computer, A.I. Working Paper 139, MIT-AI Lab, Boston, MA, April, 1977.

[3]

S. Ballard and S. Shirron, The Design and Implementation of VAX/Smalltalk-80, in Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, G. Krasner (editor), Addison Wesley, September, 1983, 127-150.

[4]

W. Becker and D. Fagen, Throw Back the Little Ones, in Throw Back the Little Ones, Steely Dan, © American Broadcasting Music, Inc. (ASCAP), Los Angeles, CA, 1974.

[5]

R. Blau, Paging on an Object-Oriented Personal Computer, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, Minneapolis, MN, August, 1983.

Digital Library

[6]

R. Blomseth and H. Davis, The Orion Project—A Home for SOAR, in Smalltalk on a RISC: Architectural Investigations, D. Patterson (editor), Computer Science Division, Department of E.E.C.S., University of California, Berkeley, CA, April, 1983, 64-109.

[7]

J. Cohen, Garbage collection of Linked Data Structures, ACM Computing Surveys 13, 3 (Sept. 1981), 341-367.

Digital Library

[8]

G. E. Collins, A Method for Overlapping and Erasure of Lists, Comm. of the ACM 3, 12 (1960), 655-657.

Digital Library

[9]

P. J. Denning, Virtual Memory, Computing Surveys 2, 3 (September, 1970), 153-189.

Digital Library

[10]

L. P. Deutsch and D. G. Bobrow, An Efficient Incremental Automatic Garbage Collector, Comm. of the ACM 19, 9 (September 1976), 522-526.

Digital Library

[11]

L. P. Deutsch, An Upper Bound for Smalltalk-80 Execution on a Motorola 68000 CPU, private communications, 1982.

[12]

L. P. Deutsch, Storage Reclamation, Berkeley Smalltalk Seminar, Feb. 5, 1982.

[13]

L. P. Deutsch, Storage Management, private communications, 1983.

[14]

L. P. Deutsch and A. M. Schiffman, Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System, Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM SIGACT News-SIGPLAN Notices Symposium on the Principles of Programming Languages, Salt Lake City, Utah, January, 1984.

Digital Library

[15]

R. Fateman, Garbage Collection Overhead, private communication, August, 1983.

[16]

J. K. Foderaro and R. J. Fateman, Characterization of VAX Macsyma, Proceedings of the 1981 ACM Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation, Berkeley, CA, 1981, 14-19.

Digital Library

[17]

A. J. Goldberg and D. Robson, Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1983.

Digital Library

[18]

D. H. H. Ingalls, The Evolution of the Smalltalk Virtual Machine, in Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, G. Krasner (editor), Addison Wesley, September, 1983, 9-28.

[19]

T. Kaehler and G. Krasner, LOOM-Large Object-Oriented Memory for Smalltalk-80 Systems, in Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, G. Krasner (editor), Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1983, 249.

[20]

T. Kilburn, D. B. G. Edwards, M. J. Lanigan and F. H. Sumner, One-Level Storage System, in Computer Structures: Principles and Examples, D. P. Siewiorek, C. G. Bell and A. Newell (editor), McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1982, 135-148. Originally in IRE Transactions, EC-11, vol 2, April 1962, pp 223-235.

[21]

M. Klein and P. Foley, Preliminary SOAR Architecture, in Smalltalk on a RISC: Architectural Investigations, D. Patterson (editor), Computer Science Division, Department of E.E.C.S., University of California, Berkeley, CA, April, 1983, 1-24.

[22]

D. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1973.

Digital Library

[23]

H. Lieberman and C. Hewitt, A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects, Comm. of the ACM 26, 6 419-429.

Digital Library

[24]

W. Lonergan and P. King, Design of the B 5500 System, in Computer Structures: Principles and Examples, D. P. Siewiorek, C. G. Bell and A. Newell (editor), McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1982, 129-134. Originally in Datamation, vol. 7, no. 5, May 1961. pp 28-32.

[25]

K. McCall, The Smalltalk-80 Benchmarks, in Smalltalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, G. Krasner (editor), Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1983, 151-173.

[26]

J. McCarthy, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, I, Comm. of the ACM 3 (1960), 184-195.

Digital Library

[27]

D. A. Patterson, Smalltalk on a RISC: Architectural Investigations, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA, April 1983. Proceedings of CS292R.

[28]

B. Sheil, Environments for Exploratory Programming, Datamation, February, 1983.

[29]

J. W. Stamos, A Large Object-Oriented Virtual Memory: Grouping Strategies, Measurements, and Performance, Xerox technical report, SCG-82-2, Xerox, Pals Alto Research Center, Pals Alto, CA, May 1982.

[30]

T. A. Standish, Data Structure Techniques, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1980.

Digital Library

[31]

A. J. Thadhani, Interactive User Productivity, IBM Systems Journal 20, 4 (1981), 407-421.

Digital Library

[32]

D. M. Ungar and D. A. Patterson, Berkeley Smalltalk: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?, in Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Word of Advice, G. Krasner (editor), September, 1983, 189.

[33]

D. Ungar, R. Blau, P. Foley, D. Samples and D. Patterson, Architecture of SOAR: Smalltalk on a RISC, Eleventh Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Ann Arbor, MI, June, 1984.

Digital Library

[34]

J. L. White, Address/Memory Management For A Gigantic LISP Environment or, GC Considered Harmful, Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, Redwood Estates, CA, 1980, 119-127.

Digital Library

Cited By

Wu MLi ZChen HZang BWang SYu LLi SSong H(2024)Toward an SGX-Friendly Java RuntimeIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2023.331840073:1(44-57)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2023.3318400
Basso MProkopec ARosà ABinder W(2023)Optimization-Aware Compiler-Level Event ProfilingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/359147345:2(1-50)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591473
(2023)BibliographyEngineering a Compiler10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00023-1(793-813)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00023-1
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm
1. Information systems
  1. Information storage systems
    1. Storage management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        File systems management
        Memory management
        Virtual memory

Recommendations

Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm

Many interactive computing environments provide automatic storage reclamation and virtual memory to ease the burden of managing storage. Unfortunately, many storage reclamation algorithms impede interaction with distracting pauses. Generation Scavenging ...
Read More
Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm
SDE 1: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments

Many interactive computing environments provide automatic storage reclamation and virtual memory to ease the burden of managing storage. Unfortunately, many storage reclamation algorithms impede interaction with distracting pauses. Generation Scavenging ...
Read More
Offline GC: trashing reachable objects on tiny devices
SenSys '11: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

The ability of tiny embedded devices to run large and feature-rich Java programs is typically constrained by the amount of memory installed on those devices. Furthermore, the useful operation of such devices in a wireless sensor application is limited ...
Read More

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 9, Issue 3

May 1984

196 pages

ISSN:0163-5948

DOI:10.1145/390010

Editor:
Peter Henderson

Issue’s Table of Contents

SDE 1: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments
April 1984
196 pages
ISBN:0897911318
DOI:10.1145/800020
Chairmen:
William Riddle,
Peter B. Henderson

Copyright © 1984 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 April 1984

Published in SIGSOFT Volume 9, Issue 3

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

663
Total Citations
View Citations
2,025
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)206
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)13

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wu MLi ZChen HZang BWang SYu LLi SSong H(2024)Toward an SGX-Friendly Java RuntimeIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2023.331840073:1(44-57)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2023.3318400
Basso MProkopec ARosà ABinder W(2023)Optimization-Aware Compiler-Level Event ProfilingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/359147345:2(1-50)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591473
(2023)BibliographyEngineering a Compiler10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00023-1(793-813)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00023-1
Cooper KTorczon L(2023)Implementing ProceduresEngineering a Compiler10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00012-7(275-325)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815412-0.00012-7
Gnana Jeevan AMaluk Mohamed M(2018)SOGC: Implementing surrogate object garbage collector management for a Mobile Cloud EnvironmentConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.494331:4Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4943
Hamanaka SKurihara SFukuda SMori ROguchi MYamaguchi S(2017)Object lifetime trend of modern Android applications for GC performance improvementProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication10.1145/3022227.3022311(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022227.3022311
Briggs KZhou BDueck G(2017)Cold object identification in the Java virtual machineSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.239647:1(79-95)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2396
Li PDing CLuo H(2014)Modeling heap data growth using average livenessACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775049.260299749:11(71-82)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775049.2602997
Sartor JHeirman WBlackburn SEeckhout LMcKinley KAmaral JTorrellas J(2014)Cooperative cache scrubbingProceedings of the 23rd international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation10.1145/2628071.2628083(15-26)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2628071.2628083
Li PDing CLuo HGrove DGuyer S(2014)Modeling heap data growth using average livenessProceedings of the 2014 international symposium on Memory management10.1145/2602988.2602997(71-82)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2602988.2602997
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents