Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm

  • Authors:
  • David Ungar

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, California

  • Venue:
  • SDE 1 Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

Many interactive computing environments provide automatic storage reclamation and virtual memory to ease the burden of managing storage. Unfortunately, many storage reclamation algorithms impede interaction with distracting pauses. Generation Scavenging is a reclamation algorithm that has no noticeable pauses, eliminates page faults for transient objects, compacts objects without resorting to indirection, and reclaims circular structures, in one third the time of traditional approaches. We have incorporated Generation Scavenging in Berkeley Smalltalk(BS), our Smalltalk-80 implementation, and instrumented it to obtain performance data. We are also designing a microprocessor with hardware support for Generation Scavenging.