Using prefetching to improve reference-counting garbage collectors

Authors:
Harel Paz;Erez Petrank
Affiliations:
IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Haifa, Israel;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA
Venue:
CC'07 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Compiler construction
Year:
2007

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Abstract

Reference counting is a classical garbage collection method. Recently, a series of papers have extended the basic method to drastically reduce its notorious overhead and extend the basic method to run concurrently and efficiently on a modern computing platform. In this paper we investigate the use of prefetching to further improve the efficiency of the reference-counting collector. We propose potential prefetching opportunities for the advanced reference-counting collector and report an implementation of a collector that employs such prefetching. The proposed prefetch instructions were inserted into the Jikes reference-counting collector obtaining an average reduction of 8.7% of the memory management overheads.