Short-term memory for self-collecting mutators

We propose a new memory model called short-term memory for managing objects on the heap. In contrast to the traditional persistent memory model for heap management, objects in short-term memory expire after a finite amount of time, which makes deallocation unnecessary. Instead, expiration of objects may be extended, if necessary, by refreshing. We have developed a concurrent, incremental, and non-moving implementation of short-term memory for explicit refreshing called self-collecting mutators that is based on programmer-controlled time and integrated into state-of-the-art runtimes of three programming languages: C, Java, and Go. All memory management operations run in constant time without acquiring any locks modulo the underlying allocators. Our implementation does not require any additional heap management threads, hence the name. Expired objects may be collected anywhere between one at a time for maximal incrementality and all at once for maximal throughput and minimal memory con...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IWMM
• Authors: Martin Aigner, Andreas Haas, Christoph M. Kirsch, Michael Lippautz, Ana Sokolova, Stephanie Stroka, Andreas Unterweger
• Keywords: Hardware, Heap Management, IWMM 2011, Persistent Memory Model, Programming Languages C