Parallel Generational-Copying Garbage Collection with a Block-Structured Heap

  • Simon Marlow ,
  • Tim Harris ,
  • Simon Peyton Jones

ISMM '08: Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on Memory management |

Published by ACM

Publication

We present a parallel generational-copying garbage collector implemented for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. We use a block-structured memory allocator, which provides a natural granularity for dividing the work of GC between many threads, leading to a simple yet effective method for parallelising copying GC. The results are encouraging: we demonstrate wall-clock speedups of on average a factor of 2 in GC time on a commodity 4-core machine with no programmer intervention, compared to our best sequential GC.