ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 2006
In systems that support garbage collection, a tension exists between collecting garbage too frequ... more In systems that support garbage collection, a tension exists between collecting garbage too frequently and not collecting it frequently enough. Garbage collection that occurs too frequently may introduce unnecessary overheads at the risk of not collecting much garbage during each cycle. On the other hand, collecting garbage too infrequently can result in applications that execute with a large amount of virtual memory (i.e., with a large footprint) and suffer from increased execution times due to paging.In this article, we use a large set of Java applications and the highly tuned and widely used Boehm-Demers-Weiser (BDW) conservative mark-and-sweep garbage collector to experimentally examine the extent to which the frequency of garbage collection impacts an application's execution time, footprint, and pause times. We use these results to devise some guidelines for controlling garbage collection and heap growth in a conservative garbage collector in order to minimize application e...
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