Dynamic Adaptive Pre-Tenuring

In a generational garbage collector, a pre-tenured object is one that is allocated directly in the old generation. Pre-tenuring long-lived objects can reduce the number of times that they are scanned or copied during garbage collection. Previous work has investigated pre-tenuring based on off-line analysis of execution traces. In contrast, this paper presents a dynamic technique in which the decision to pre-tenure a particular kind of object is taken at run-time. This allows decisions to depend on the inputs of a particular application run and also allows decisions to be changed as the application enters different phases. An implementation is presented for the Java Virtual Machine.