Microphase: an approach to proactively invoking garbage collection for improved performance

To date, the most commonly used criterion for invoking garbage collection (GC) is based on heap usage; that is garbage collection is invoked when the heap or an area inside the heap is full. This approach can suffer from two performance shortcomings, untimely garbage collection invocations and large volumes of surviving objects. In this work, we explore a new GC triggering approach called MicroPhase that exploits two observations, (i) allocation requests occur in phases and (ii) the phase boundaries coincide with times when most objects also die, to proactively invoke garbage collection yielding high efficiency. We extended the HotSpot virtual machine from Sun Microsystems to support MicroPhase and conducted experiments using 20 benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that our technique can reduce the GC times in 19 applications. The differences in GC overhead range from an increase of 1% to a decrease of 26% when the heap is set to be twice the maximum live-size. As a result, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Feng Xian, Witawas Srisa-an, Hong Jiang
• Keywords: Garbage Collection, GC Triggering Approach, Heap Usage, OOPSLA 2007