Evaluation of thread-local garbage collection

Abstract

This paper discusses thread-local garbage collection (GC), a technique of automatic memory management aimed at improving GC throughput and reducing GC pauses in managed runtimes. It exploits the observation that most objects do not escape the scope of the thread that allocated them; therefore, memory occupied by those objects can be reclaimed locally within the thread. Performance measurements demonstrate that the proposed scheme has an advantage over a highly optimized stop-the-world collector used in an experimental JVM on some throughput-oriented benchmarks.