Assessing the Scalability of Garbage Collectors on Many Cores

Managed Runtime Environments (MRE) are increasingly used for application servers that use large multi-core hardware. We find that the garbage collector is critical for overall performance in this setting. We explore the costs and scalability of the garbage collectors on a contemporary 48-core multip...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Operating systems review 2012-01, Vol.45 (3), p.15-19
Main Authors: GIDRA, Lokesh, THOMAS, Gaël, SOPENA, Julien, SHAPIRO, Marc
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Computer Science
Computer science
control theory
systems
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Exact sciences and technology
Memory and file management (including protection and security)
Memory organisation. Data processing
Other
Software
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Summary:Managed Runtime Environments (MRE) are increasingly used for application servers that use large multi-core hardware. We find that the garbage collector is critical for overall performance in this setting. We explore the costs and scalability of the garbage collectors on a contemporary 48-core multiprocessor machine. We present experimental evaluation of the parallel and concurrent garbage collectors present in OpenJDK, a widely-used Java virtual machine. We show that garbage collection represents a substantial amount of an application's execution time, and does not scale well as the number of cores increases. We attempt to identify some critical scalability bottlenecks for garbage collectors.
ISSN:0163-5980
1943-586X
DOI:10.1145/2094091.2094096