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Infant mortality and generational garbage collection

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Henry G. BakerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 28, Issue 4

Pages 55 - 57

https://doi.org/10.1145/152739.152747

Published: 01 April 1993 Publication History

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Abstract

Generation-based garbage collection has been advocated by appealing to the intuitive but vague notion that "young objects are more likely to die than old objects". The intuition is, that if a generation-based garbage collection scheme focuses its effort on scanning recently created objects, then its scanning efforts will pay off more in the form of more recovered garbage, than if it scanned older objects. In this note, we show a counterexample of a system in which "infant mortality" is as high as you please, but for which generational garbage collection is ineffective for improving the average mark/cons ratio. Other benefits, such as better locality and a smaller number of large delays, may still make generational garbage collection attractive for such a system, however.

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Cited By

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Hamanaka SKurihara SFukuda SMori ROguchi MYamaguchi S(2017)Object lifetime trend of modern Android applications for GC performance improvementProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication10.1145/3022227.3022311(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022227.3022311
Hamanaka SKurihara SFukuda SOguchi MYamaguchi S(2016)A Study on Object Lifetime in GC of Android Applications2016 Fourth International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR)10.1109/CANDAR.2016.0126(701-703)Online publication date: Nov-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/CANDAR.2016.0126
Shidal JSpilo AScheid PCytron RKavi K(2015)Recycling trash in cacheACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887746.275418350:11(118-130)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754183
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Index Terms

Infant mortality and generational garbage collection
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
      2. Language types
        Object oriented languages

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Published In

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 28, Issue 4

April 1993

61 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/152739

Editor:
Richard L. Wexelblat
IDA/CSED, Alexandria, VA

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 April 1993

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 28, Issue 4

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Hamanaka SKurihara SFukuda SMori ROguchi MYamaguchi S(2017)Object lifetime trend of modern Android applications for GC performance improvementProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication10.1145/3022227.3022311(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022227.3022311
Hamanaka SKurihara SFukuda SOguchi MYamaguchi S(2016)A Study on Object Lifetime in GC of Android Applications2016 Fourth International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR)10.1109/CANDAR.2016.0126(701-703)Online publication date: Nov-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/CANDAR.2016.0126
Shidal JSpilo AScheid PCytron RKavi K(2015)Recycling trash in cacheACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887746.275418350:11(118-130)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754183
Shidal JSpilo AScheid PCytron RKavi KHosking ABond M(2015)Recycling trash in cacheProceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/2754169.2754183(118-130)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
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Recommendations

Do generational schemes improve the garbage collection efficiency?

Age-based garbage collection

Combining generational and conservative garbage collection: framework and implementations

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