Schism: fragmentation-tolerant real-time garbage collection

  • Authors:

  • Filip Pizlo;Lukasz Ziarek;Petr Maj;Antony L. Hosking;Ethan Blanton;Jan Vitek

  • Affiliations:

  • Fiji Systems, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA;Fiji Systems, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA;Fiji Systems, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  • Venue:
  • PLDI '10 Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Managed languages such as Java and C# are being considered for use in hard real-time systems. A hurdle to their widespread adoption is the lack of garbage collection algorithms that offer predictable space-and-time performance in the face of fragmentation. We introduce SCHISM/CMR, a new concurrent and real-time garbage collector that is fragmentation tolerant and guarantees time-and-space worst-case bounds while providing good throughput. SCHISM/CMR combines mark-region collection of fragmented objects and arrays (arraylets) with separate replication-copying collection of immutable arraylet spines, so as to cope with external fragmentation when running in small heaps. We present an implementation of SCHISM/CMR in the Fiji VM, a high-performance Java virtual machine for mission-critical systems, along with a thorough experimental evaluation on a wide variety of architectures, including server-class and embedded systems. The results show that SCHISM/CMR tolerates fragmentation better than previous schemes, with a much more acceptable throughput penalty.