Scheduling real-time garbage collection on uniprocessors

  • Authors:

  • Tomas Kalibera;Filip Pizlo;Antony L. Hosking;Jan Vitek

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom;Purdue University, West Lafayette;Purdue University, West Lafayette;Purdue University, West Lafayette

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Managed languages such as Java and C# are increasingly being considered for hard real-time applications because of their productivity and software engineering advantages. Automatic memory management, or garbage collection, is a key enabler for robust, reusable libraries, yet remains a challenge for analysis and implementation of real-time execution environments. This article comprehensively compares leading approaches to hard real-time garbage collection. There are many design decisions involved in selecting a real-time garbage collection algorithm. For time-based garbage collectors on uniprocessors one must choose whether to use periodic, slack-based or hybrid scheduling. A significant impediment to valid experimental comparison of such choices is that commercial implementations use completely different proprietary infrastructures. We present Minuteman, a framework for experimenting with real-time collection algorithms in the context of a high-performance execution environment for real-time Java. We provide the first comparison of the approaches, both experimentally using realistic workloads, and analytically in terms of schedulability.