Waste not, want not: resource-based garbage collection in a shared environment

To achieve optimal performance, garbage-collected applications must balance the sizes of their heaps dynamically. Sizing the heap too small can reduce throughput by increasing the number of garbage collections that must be performed. Too large a heap, however, can cause the system to page and drag down the overall throughput. In today’s multicore, multiprocessor machines, multiple garbage-collected applications may run simultaneously. As a result, each virtual machine (VM) must adjust its memory demands to reflect not only the behavior of the application it is running, but also the behavior of the peer applications running on the system. We present a memory management system that enables VMs to react to memory demands dynamically. Our approach allows the applications’ heaps to remain small enough to avoid the negative impacts of paging, while still taking advantage of any memory that is available within the system. This memory manager, which we call Poor Richard’s Memory Manage...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IWMM
• Authors: Matthew Hertz, Stephen Kane, Elizabeth Keudel, Tongxin Bai, Chen Ding, Xiaoming Gu, Jonathan E. Bard
• Keywords: Garbage Collection Algorithm, Garbage Collections, Hardware, IWMM 2011, Memory Management System