Comparing mark-and sweep and stop-and-copy garbage collection

Abstract

Stop-and-copy garbage collection has been preferred to mark-and-sweep collection in the last decade because its collection time is proportional to the size of reachable data and not to the memory size. This paper compares the CPU overhead and the memory requirements of the two collection algorithms extended with generations, and finds that mark-and-sweep collection requires at most a small amount of additional CPU overhead (3-6%) but, requires an average of 20% (and up to 40%) less memory to achieve the same page fault rate. The comparison is based on results obtained using trace-driven simulation with large Common Lisp programs.