Garbage Collection without Paging

Garbage collection offers numerous software engineering advantages, but interacts poorly with virtual memory managers. Existing garbage collectors require far more pages than the application’s working set and touch pages without regard to which ones are in memory, especially during full-heap garbage collection. The resulting paging can cause throughput to plummet and pause times to spike up to seconds or even minutes.

I present a garbage collector that avoids paging. This bookmarking collector cooperates with the virtual memory manager to guide its eviction decisions. Using summary information (“bookmarks”) recorded from evicted pages, the collector can perform in-memory full-heap collections. In the absence of memory pressure, the bookmarking collector matches the throughput of the best collector we tested while running in smaller heaps. In the face of memory pressure, it improves throughput by up to a factor of five and reduces pause times by up to a factor of 45 over the next best collector. Compared to a collector that consistently provides high throughput (generational mark-sweep), the bookmarking collector reduces pause times by up to 218x and improves throughput by up to 41x. Bookmarking collection thus provides greater utilization of available physical memory than other collectors while matching or exceeding their throughput.

This is joint work with Matthew Hertz and Yi Feng at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Speaker Details

Emery Berger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability and performance. He is the creator of various widely-used software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications. His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship (2001), an NSF CAREER Award (2003), a Lilly Teaching Fellowship (2006), and a Best Paper Award at FAST 2007. Professor Berger served as the General Chair of the Memory Systems Performance and Correctness 2008 workshop, and serves as an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems.

Date:
Speakers:
Emery Berger
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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