research-article

Optimizations in a private nursery-based garbage collector

Author:

Todd A. AndersonAuthors Info & Claims

ISMM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 international symposium on Memory management

Pages 21 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/1806651.1806655

Published: 05 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes a garbage collector designed around the use of permanent, private, thread-local nurseries and is principally oriented towards functional languages. We try to maximize the cache hit rate by having threads continually reuse their individual private nurseries. These private nurseries operate in such a way that they can be garbage collected independently of other threads, which creates low collection pause times. Objects which survive thread-local collections are moved to a mature generation that can be collected either concurrently or in a stop-the-world fashion. We describe several optimizations (including two dynamic control parameter adaptation schemes) related to garbage collecting the private nurseries and to our concurrent collector, some of which are made possible when the language provides mutability information. We tested our collector against six benchmarks and saw single-threaded performance improvements in the range of 5-74%. We also saw a 10x increase (for 24 processors) in scalability for one parallel benchmark that had previously been memory-bound.

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Cited By

Elsman M(2023)Garbage-Collection Safety for Region-Based Type-Polymorphic ProgramsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912297:PLDI(221-243)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591229
Westrick SArora JAcar U(2022)Entanglement detection with near-zero costProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35476466:ICFP(679-710)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3547646
Arora JWestrick SAcar U(2021)Provably space-efficient parallel functional programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34342995:POPL(1-33)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434299
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Index Terms

Optimizations in a private nursery-based garbage collector
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Allocation / deallocation strategies
        Garbage collection

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISMM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 international symposium on Memory management

June 2010

140 pages

ISBN:9781450300544

DOI:10.1145/1806651

General Chair:
Jan Vitek
Purdue University
,
Program Chair:
Doug Lea
State University of New York at Oswego

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 45, Issue 8
ISMM '10
August 2010
129 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1837855
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2010 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]

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Published: 05 June 2010

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ISMM '10: International Symposium on Memory Management

June 5 - 6, 2010

Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 72 of 156 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

Elsman M(2023)Garbage-Collection Safety for Region-Based Type-Polymorphic ProgramsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912297:PLDI(221-243)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591229
Westrick SArora JAcar U(2022)Entanglement detection with near-zero costProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35476466:ICFP(679-710)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3547646
Arora JWestrick SAcar U(2021)Provably space-efficient parallel functional programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34342995:POPL(1-33)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434299
ELSMAN MHALLENBERG N(2021)Integrating region memory management and tag-free generational garbage collectionJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682100001031Online publication date: 22-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796821000010
Willis JWu NPickering M(2020)Staged selective parser combinatorsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34090024:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3409002
Charguéraud A(2020)Separation logic for sequential programs (functional pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34089984:ICFP(1-34)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408998
Sivaramakrishnan KDolan SWhite LJaffer SKelly TSahoo AParimala SDhiman AMadhavapeddy A(2020)Retrofitting parallelism onto OCamlProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34089954:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408995
Farvardin KReppy JDonaldson ATorlak E(2020)From folklore to fact: comparing implementations of stacks and continuationsProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3385412.3385994(75-90)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3385412.3385994
Ismail MSuh GMars JTang LXue JWu P(2020)Efficient nursery sizing for managed languages on multi-core processors with shared cachesProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3368826.3377908(1-15)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368826.3377908
Elsman MHallenberg N(2020)On the Effects of Integrating Region-Based Memory Management and Generational Garbage Collection in MLPractical Aspects of Declarative Languages10.1007/978-3-030-39197-3_7(95-112)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39197-3_7
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