Garbage collection (computer science)

Summary

In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory which was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp. Garbage collection relieves the programmer from doing manual memory management, where the programmer specifies what objects to de-allocate and return to the memory system and when to do so. Other, similar techniques include stack allocation, region inference, and memory ownership, and combinations thereof. Garbage collection may take a significant proportion of a program's total processing time, and affect performance as a result. Resources other than memory, such as network sockets, database handles, windows, descriptors, and device descriptors, are not typically handled by garbage collection

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This paper presents a transactional framework for low-latency, high-performance, concurrent event processing in Java. At the heart of our framework lies Reﬂexes, a restricted programming model for highly responsive systems. A Reﬂex task is an event processor that can run at a higher priority and preempt any other Java thread, including the garbage collector. It runs in an obstruction-free manner with time-oblivious code. We extend Reﬂexes with a publish/subscribe communication system, it- self based on an optimistic transactional event processing scheme, that provides eﬃcient coordination between time-critical, low-latency tasks.We report on the comparison with a commercial JVM, and show that it is possible for tasks to achieve 50 µs response times with way less than 1% of the executions failing to meet their deadlines.

Springer-Verlag New York, Ms Ingrid Cunningham, 175 Fifth Ave, New York, Ny 10010 Usa2009

Optimal Asynchronous Garbage Collection for Checkpointing Protocols with Rollback-Dependency Trackability

Rodrigo Malta Schmidt, Fernando Pedone

Communication-induced checkpointing protocols that ensure rollback-dependency trackability (RDT) guarantee important properties to the recovery system without explicit coordination. However, to the best of our knowledge, there was no garbage collection algorithm for them which did not use some type of process synchronization, like time assumptions or reliable control message exchanges. This paper addresses the problem of garbage collection for RDT checkpointing protocols and presents an optimal solution for the case where coordination is done only by means of timestamps piggybacked in application messages. Our algorithm uses the same timestamps as off-the-shelf RDT protocols and ensures the tight upper bound on the number of uncollected checkpoints for each process during all the execution.

2004

Optimal Asynchronous Garbage Collection for RDT Checkpointing Protocols

Rodrigo Malta Schmidt, Fernando Pedone

2005