A Phase-Adaptive Garbage Collector Using Dynamic Heap Partitioning and Opportunistic Collection

Abstract

Applications usually have their own phases in heap memory usage. The traditional garbage collector fails to match various application phases, because the same heuristic on the object behavior is used throughout the entire execution. This paper introduces a phase-adaptive garbage collector which reorganizes the heap layout and adjusts the invocation time of the garbage collection according to the phases. The proposed collector identifies phase,., by detecting the application methods strongly related to the phase boundaries. The experimental results show that the proposed phase-adaptive collector successfully recognizes application phases and improves the garbage collection time by as much as 41%.