Infant mortality and generational garbage collection

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Infant mortality and generational garbage collection

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ACM SIGPLAN Notices archive
Volume 28 , Issue 4 (April 1993) table of contents

Pages: 55 - 57

Year of Publication: 1993

ISSN:0362-1340

Author

Henry G. Baker

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 1, Downloads (12 Months): 21, Citation Count: 13

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ABSTRACT

Generation-based garbage collection has been advocated by appealing to the intuitive but vague notion that "young objects are more likely to die than old objects". The intuition is, that if a generation-based garbage collection scheme focuses its effort on scanning recently created objects, then its scanning efforts will pay off more in the form of more recovered garbage, than if it scanned older objects. In this note, we show a counterexample of a system in which "infant mortality" is as high as you please, but for which generational garbage collection is ineffective for improving the average mark/cons ratio. Other benefits, such as better locality and a smaller number of large delays, may still make generational garbage collection attractive for such a system, however.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 13

	Umesh Maheshwari , Barbara Liskov, Partitioned garbage collection of a large object store, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.26 n.2, p.313-323, June 1997
	Darko Stefanović , Kathryn S. McKinley , J. Eliot B. Moss, Age-based garbage collection, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.34 n.10, p.370-381, Oct. 1999
	Darko Stefanovic , J. Eliot B. Moss, Characterization of object behaviour in Standard ML of New Jersey, ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, v.VII n.3, p.43-54, July-Sept. 1994
	Yefim Shuf , Manish Gupta , Rajesh Bordawekar , Jaswinder Pal Singh, Exploiting prolific types for memory management and optimizations, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.37 n.1, p.295-306, Jan. 2002
	William D. Clinger , Lars T. Hansen, Generational garbage collection and the radioactive decay model, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.32 n.5, p.97-108, May 1997
	Lars T. Hansen , William D. Clinger, An experimental study of renewal-older-first garbage collection, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.37 n.9, p.247-258, September 2002
	William D. Clinger , Fabio V. Rojas, Linear combinations of radioactive decay models for generational garbage collection, Science of Computer Programming, v.62 n.2, p.184-203, 1 October 2006
	Richard Jones, Five perspectives on modern memory management: systems, hardware and theory, Science of Computer Programming, v.62 n.2, p.95-97, 1 October 2006
	David Detlefs , Ross Knippel , William D. Clinger , Matthias Jacob, Concurrent Remembered Set Refinement in Generational Garbage Collection, Proceedings of the 2nd Java™ Virtual Machine Research and Technology Symposium, p.13-26, August 01-02, 2002
	Henry G. Baker, Thermodynamics and garbage collection, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.29 n.4, p.58-63, April 1994
	Nandakumar Sankaran, A bibliography on garbage collection and related topics, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.29 n.9, p.149-158, Sept. 1994
	Michal Wegiel , Chandra Krintz, XMem: type-safe, transparent, shared memory for cross-runtime communication and coordination, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.43 n.6, June 2008
	Feng Xian , Witawas Srisa-an , Hong Jiang, Allocation-phase aware thread scheduling policies to improve garbage collection performance, Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Memory management, October 21-22, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada