article

Older-first garbage collection in practice: evaluation in a Java Virtual Machine

Authors:

Darko Stefanović,

Stephen M. Blackburn,

Kathryn S. McKinley,

J. Eliot B. MossAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 38, Issue 2 supplement

Pages 25 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/773039.773042

Published: 16 June 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Until recently, the best performing copying garbage collectors used a generational policy which repeatedly collects the very youngest objects, copies any survivors to an older space, and then infrequently collects the older space. A previous study that used garbage-collection simulation pointed to potential improvements by using an Older-First copying garbage collection algorithm. The Older-First algorithm sweeps a fixed-sized window through the heap from older to younger objects, and avoids copying the very youngest objects which have not yet had sufficient time to die. We describe and examine here an implementation of the Older-First algorithm in the Jikes RVM for Java. This investigation shows that Older-First can perform as well as the simulation results suggested, and greatly improves total program performance when compared to using a fixed-size nursery generational collector. We further compare Older-First to a flexible-size nursery generational collector in which the nursery occupies all of the heap that does not contain older objects. In these comparisons, the flexible-nursery collector is occasionally the better of the two, but on average the Older-First collector performs the best.

References

[1]

ALPERN, B., ATTANASIO, C. R., COCCHI, A., LIEBER, D., SMITH, S., NGO, T., BARTON, J. J., HUMMEL, S. F., SHEPERD, J. C., AND MERGEN, M. Implementing Jalapeño in Java. In Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA '99), Denver, Colorado, USA, November 1--5, 1999 (October 1999), vol. 34(10) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press, pp. 314--324.]]

Digital Library

[2]

ALPERN, B., ATTANASIO, D., BARTON, J., BURKE, M., CHENG, P., CHOI, J., COCCHI, A., FINK, S., GROVE, D., HIND, M., HUMMEL, S., LIEBER, D., LITVINOV, V., NGO, T., MERGEN, M., SARKAR, V., SERRANO, M., SHEPHERD, J., SMITH, S., SREEDHAR, V., SRINIVASAN, H., AND WHALEY, J. The Jalapeño virtual machine. IBM Systems Journal 39(1) (Feb. 2000).]]

Digital Library

[3]

APPEL, A. W. Simple generational garbage collection and fast allocation. Software Practice and Experience 19, 2 (1989), 171--183.]]

Digital Library

[4]

BLACKBURN, S. M., JONES, R., McKINLEY, K. S., AND MOSS, J. E. B. Beltway: Getting around garbage collection gridlock. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) (June 2002), ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press. to appear.]]

Digital Library

[5]

BLACKBURN, S. M., AND MCKINLEY, K. S. In or out? Putting write barriers in their place. In Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM '02 (Berlin, Germany, June 2002), vol. 37 of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press.]]

Digital Library

[6]

BLACKBURN, S. M., SINGHAI, S., HERTZ, M., MCKINLEY, K. S., AND MOSS, J. E. B. Pretenuring for Java. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN 2001 Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, & Applications (Tampa, FL, Oct. 2001 ), vol. 36(10) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press, pp. 342--352.]]

Digital Library

[7]

CHENG, P., AND BLELLOCH, G. A parallel, real-time garbage collector. In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Snowbird, Utah, USA, June 20--22, 2001 (Snowbird, UT, May 2001), vol, 36(5) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press, pp. 125--136.]]

[8]

DIECKMAN, S., AND HÖLZLE, U. A study of the allocation behavior of the SPECjvm98 Java benchmarks. In ECOOP'98 -Object-Oriented Programming, 12th European Conference, Brussels, Belgium, July 20--24, 1998, Proceedings (1998), E. Jul, Ed., vol. 1445 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, pp. 92--115.]]

Digital Library

[9]

LIEBERMAN, H., AND HEWITT, C. E. A real-time garbage collector based on the lifetimes of objects. Communications of the ACM 26(6) (1983), 419--429. Also report TM-184, Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, July 1980 and AI Lab Memo 569, 1981.]]

Digital Library

[10]

MAY, C., SILHA, E., SIMPSON, R., AND WARREN, H., Eds. The PowerPC Archiecture: A Specification for a New Family of RISC Processors, second ed. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, California, 1994.]]

Digital Library

[11]

STANDARD PERFORMANCE EVALUATION CORPORATION. SPECjvm98 Documentation, release 1.03 ed., March 1999.]]

[12]

STANDARD PERFORMANCE EVALUATION CORPORATION. SPECjbb2000 (Java Business Benchmark) Documentation, release 1.01 ed., 2001.]]

[13]

STEFANOVIĆ D. Properties of Age-Based Automatic Memory Reclamation Algorithms. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Feb. 1999.]]

Digital Library

[14]

STEFANOVIĆ, D., MCKINLEY, K. S., AND MOSS, J. E. B. Age-based garbage collection. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN 1999 Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, & Applications (Denver, CO, Oct. 1999), vol. 34(10) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, ACM Press, pp. 379--381.]]

Digital Library

[15]

UNGAR, D. Generation scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Software Engineering Symposium on Practical Software Development Environments (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Apr. 1984), SIGPLAN Notices 19, 5 (May 1984), pp. 157--167.]]

Digital Library

Cited By

Qian JSrisa-an WSeth SJiang HLi DYi P(2016)Exploiting FIFO Scheduler to Improve Parallel Garbage Collection PerformanceACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3007611.289224851:7(109-121)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://doi.org/10.1145/3007611.2892248
Qian JSrisa-an WSeth SJiang HLi DYi PGupta-Cledat VPorter DSarkar V(2016)Exploiting FIFO Scheduler to Improve Parallel Garbage Collection PerformanceProceedings of the12th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2892242.2892248(109-121)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2892242.2892248
Xian FSrisa-an WJiang H(2007)MicrophaseACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1297105.129703442:10(77-96)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1297105.1297034
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Older-first garbage collection in practice: evaluation in a Java Virtual Machine
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

Older-first garbage collection in practice: evaluation in a Java Virtual Machine
MSP '02: Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Memory system performance

Until recently, the best performing copying garbage collectors used a generational policy which repeatedly collects the very youngest objects, copies any survivors to an older space, and then infrequently collects the older space. A previous study that ...
An experimental study of renewal-older-first garbage collection

Generational collection has improved the efficiency of garbage collection in fast-allocating programs by focusing on collecting young garbage, but has done little to reduce the cost of collecting a heap containing large amounts of older data. A new ...
An experimental study of renewal-older-first garbage collection
ICFP '02: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Generational collection has improved the efficiency of garbage collection in fast-allocating programs by focusing on collecting young garbage, but has done little to reduce the cost of collecting a heap containing large amounts of older data. A new ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 38, Issue 2 supplement

MSP 2002 and ISMM 2002

February 2003

291 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/773039

Issue’s Table of Contents

MSP '02: Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Memory system performance
June 2002
298 pages
ISBN:9781450373685
DOI:10.1145/773146
Conference Chairs:
Frank Mueller
NC State University
,
Trishul Chilimbi
Microsoft Research
,
Chen Ding
University of Rochester

Copyright © 2002 Authors.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 June 2002

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 38, Issue 2 supplement

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

42
Total Citations
View Citations
586
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 09 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Qian JSrisa-an WSeth SJiang HLi DYi P(2016)Exploiting FIFO Scheduler to Improve Parallel Garbage Collection PerformanceACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3007611.289224851:7(109-121)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://doi.org/10.1145/3007611.2892248
Qian JSrisa-an WSeth SJiang HLi DYi PGupta-Cledat VPorter DSarkar V(2016)Exploiting FIFO Scheduler to Improve Parallel Garbage Collection PerformanceProceedings of the12th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2892242.2892248(109-121)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2892242.2892248
Xian FSrisa-an WJiang H(2007)MicrophaseACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1297105.129703442:10(77-96)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1297105.1297034
Xian FSrisa-an WJiang HGabriel RBacon DLopes CSteele G(2007)MicrophaseProceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications10.1145/1297027.1297034(77-96)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1297027.1297034
Cha CKim HHwang KKim SLee SWon H(2006)Garbage collection in an embedded java virtual machineProceedings of the 10th international conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems - Volume Part I10.1007/11892960_54(443-450)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11892960_54
Klock FClinger W(2011)Bounded-latency regional garbage collectionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2168696.204785947:2(73-84)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2168696.2047859
Singer JJones RRogers IJul EZendra O(2011)Economic theory for memory management optimizationProceedings of the 6th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems10.1145/2069172.2069176(1-4)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2069172.2069176
Klock FClinger WD'Hondt T(2011)Bounded-latency regional garbage collectionProceedings of the 7th symposium on Dynamic languages10.1145/2047849.2047859(73-84)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2047849.2047859
Wegiel MKrintz C(2008)XMemACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1379022.137562143:6(327-338)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1379022.1375621
Wegiel MKrintz CGupta RAmarasinghe S(2008)XMemProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/1375581.1375621(327-338)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1375581.1375621
Show More Cited By

View Options

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

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents