Mark-Sharing: A Parallel Garbage Collection Algorithm for Low Synchronization Overhead

Abstract

Two main problems prevent a parallel garbage collection (GC) scheme with lock-based synchronization from providing a high level of scalability: the load imbalance and the runtime overhead of thread synchronization operations. These problems become even more serious as the number of available threads increases. We propose the Mark-Sharing algorithm to improve the performance of parallel GC using transactional memory (TM) systems. The Mark-Sharing algorithm guarantees that all threads access the shared resource by using both the task-stealing and task-releasing mechanisms appropriately. In addition, we introduce a selection manager that minimizes the contention and idle time of garbage collectors by maintaining task information. The proposed algorithm outperforms the prior pool-sharing algorithm of GC in the HTM, providing more than 90% performance improvement on average.