Tax-and-spend: democratic scheduling for real-time garbage collection

Real-time Garbage Collection (RTGC) has recently advanced to the point where it is being used in production for financial trading, military command-and-control, and telecommunications. However, among potential users of RTGC, there is enormous diversity in both application requirements and deployment environments. Previously described RTGCs tend to work well in a narrow band of possible environments, leading to fragile systems and limiting adoption of real-time garbage collection technology. This paper introduces a collector scheduling methodology called tax-and-spend and the collector design revisions needed to support it. Tax-and-spend provides a general mechanism which works well across a variety of application, machine, and operating system configurations. Tax-and-spend subsumes the predominant pre-existing RTGC scheduling techniques. It allows different policies to be applied in different contexts depending on the needs of the application. Virtual machines can co-exist composition...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EMSOFT
• Authors: Joshua S. Auerbach, David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, David Grove, Ben Biron, Charlie Gracie, Bill McCloskey, Aleksandar Micic, Ryan Sciampacone
• Keywords: EMSOFT 2008, Garbage Collection Technology, Real-time Garbage Collection, Software Engineering, Virtual Machine