Article

Mark-copy: fast copying GC with less space overhead

Authors:

Narendran Sachindran,

J. Eliot B. MossAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications

Pages 326 - 343

https://doi.org/10.1145/949305.949335

Published: 26 October 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Copying garbage collectors have a number of advantages over non-copying collectors, including cheap allocation and avoiding fragmentation. However, in order to provide completeness (the guarantee to reclaim each garbage object eventually), standard copying collectors require space equal to twice the size of the maximum live data for a program. We present a mark-copy collection algorithm (MC) that extends generational copying collection and significantly reduces the heap space required to run a program. MC reduces space overhead by 75--85% compared with standard copying garbage collectors, increasing the range of applications that can use copying garbage collection. We show that when MC is given the same amount of space as a generational copying collector, it improves total execution time of Java benchmarks significantly in tight heaps, and by 5--10% in moderate size heaps. We also compare the performance of MC with a (non-generational) mark-sweep collector and a hybrid copying/mark-sweep generational collector. We find that MC can run in heaps comparable in size to the minimum heap space required by mark-sweep. We also find that for most benchmarks MC is significantly faster than mark-sweep in small and moderate size heaps. When compared with the hybrid collector, MC improves total execution time by about 5% for some benchmarks, partly by increasing the speed of execution of the application code.

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Bokhari MAlexander BWagner MCoello Coello C(2020)Towards rigorous validation of energy optimisation experimentsProceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3377930.3390245(1232-1240)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2020
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Index Terms

Mark-copy: fast copying GC with less space overhead
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Garbage collection

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cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications

October 2003

430 pages

ISBN:1581137125

DOI:10.1145/949305

Conference Chair:
Ron Crocker
Motorola, Inc.
,
Program Chair:
Guy L. Steele
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 38, Issue 11
Special Issue: Proceedings of the OOPSLA '03 conference
November 2003
417 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/949343
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

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Published: 26 October 2003

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October 26 - 30, 2003

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OOPSLA '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 147 submissions, 18%;

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Cited By

Bokhari MAlexander BWagner MCoello Coello C(2020)Towards rigorous validation of energy optimisation experimentsProceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3377930.3390245(1232-1240)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377930.3390245
Branković AStavrou KGibert EGonzález A(2014)Warm-Up Simulation Methodology for HW/SW Co-Designed ProcessorsProceedings of Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/2581122.2544142(284-294)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2581122.2544142
Branković AStavrou KGibert EGonzález A(2014)Warm-Up Simulation Methodology for HW/SW Co-Designed ProcessorsProceedings of Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/2544137.2544142(284-294)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2544137.2544142
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
Hertz MKane SKeudel EBai TDing CGu XBard J(2011)Waste not, want notACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2076022.199348746:11(65-76)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2011
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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
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Hertz MKane SKeudel EBai TDing CGu XBard JBoehm HBacon D(2011)Waste not, want notProceedings of the international symposium on Memory management10.1145/1993478.1993487(65-76)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2011
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Jingmei Li Bo Zhang (2011)Garbage collection algorithm based on embedded KVM2011 International Conference on Multimedia Technology10.1109/ICMT.2011.6002098(3535-3538)Online publication date: Jul-2011
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