Cyclic reference counting by typed reference fields

Reference counting strategy is a natural choice for real-time garbage collection, but the cycle collection phase which is required to ensure the correctness for reference counting algorithms can introduce heavy scanning overheads. This degrades the efficiency and inflates the pause time required for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer languages, systems & structures systems & structures, 2012-04, Vol.38 (1), p.98-107
Main Authors: Morris Chang, J., Chen, Wei-Mei, Griffin, Paul A., Cheng, Ho-Yuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Collection
Counting
Garbage collection
Java
Java (programming language)
Mathematical models
Memory management
Phase (cyclic)
Reference counting
Scanning
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Summary:Reference counting strategy is a natural choice for real-time garbage collection, but the cycle collection phase which is required to ensure the correctness for reference counting algorithms can introduce heavy scanning overheads. This degrades the efficiency and inflates the pause time required for garbage collection. In this paper, we present two schemes to improve the efficiency of reference counting algorithms. First, in order to make better use of the semantics of a given program, we introduce a novel classification model to predict the behavior of objects precisely. Second, in order to reduce the scanning overheads, we propose an enhancement for cyclic reference counting algorithms by utilizing strongly-typed reference features of the Java language. We implement our proposed algorithm in Jikes RVM and measure the performance over various Java benchmarks. Our results show that the number of scanned objects can be reduced by an average of 37.9% during cycle collection phase. ► We propose the DRC algorithm to improve the cyclic reference counting. ► We introduce a novel classification model to predict the behavior of objects. ► The improvements come from identifying and disregarding unnecessary operations.
ISSN:1477-8424
1873-6866
DOI:10.1016/j.cl.2011.09.001