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Reducing the latency of a real-time garbage collector

Published: 01 March 1992 Publication History

Abstract

This paper shows how to make the latency of scanning a page in the Appel-Ellis-Li real-time garbage collector be proportional only to the number of object references on a page (the page size), instead of to the sum of the sizes of the objects referenced by the page. This makes the garbage collection algorithm much more suitable for real-time systems.

References

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APPEL, A. W., AND LI, K. Virtual memory primitives for use programs. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (Santa Clara, CA, Apr. 8-11, 1991), pp. 86-107.
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Kathleen H. V. Booth

Garbage collection can be important to a long-running program in which “junk” areas of memory gradually accumulate and may eventually lead to failure due to lack of memory. Most current garbage collection routines take times on the order of hundreds of milliseconds and run at unpredictable times. This makes them unsuitable for real-time applications. This paper discusses techniques that have been proposed to deal with this problem and suggests an alternative to the Appel-Ellis real-time garbage collector by making it more “lazy.” This change has the effect of making the bound on the time taken to scan a page independent of the objects being scanned, although the author suggests that it is not a final solution to the problem. The author provides a number of schemes in pseudocode form and gives some numerical estimates to show the relative merits of garbage collection methods. A good list of current papers is provided.

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Published In

cover image ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems
ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems  Volume 1, Issue 1
March 1992
103 pages
ISSN:1057-4514
EISSN:1557-7384
DOI:10.1145/130616
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 1992
Published in LOPLAS Volume 1, Issue 1

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