SPLASH 2014
Mon 20 - Fri 24 October 2014 Portland, Oregon, United States
Wed 22 Oct 2014 11:37 - 12:00 at Salon F - Runtime Systems Chair(s): Martin Hirzel

Garbage collectors for managed languages are exact or conservative. An exact collector identifies references precisely and may move referents and update references. A conservative collector is constrained by ambiguous references in two ways. (1) Since they may be pointers, the collectors must retain referents. (2) Since they may be values, the collectors cannot modify them, pinning their referents. This paper is the first to show that retaining dead objects and pinning objects affects remarkably few heap objects: for Java benchmarks, < 0.01% are falsely retained and 0.03% are pinned.

The larger effect is collector design. Prior conservative collectors either (1) use mark-sweep and forgo moving all objects, or (2) use mostly copying and pin entire pages. This paper shows this overhead is substantial: 12% and 45% respectively, compared to generational collection in a Java VM. We introduce high performance conservative Immix and reference counting (RC). Immix is a mark-region collector that combines fine line-grain pinning and opportunistic copying of unambiguous referents. Deferred RC simply needs an object map to deliver the first conservative RC in the literature. We implement six exact collectors and their conservative counterparts. Conservative Immix variants and RC come within 2 to 3% of their exact counterparts. In particular, conservative RC Immix is slightly faster than a well-tuned exact generational collector. For managed languages, these findings show conservative collection is compatible with high performance.

Video: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gc-conservative-immix

Wed 22 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

10:30 - 12:00
Runtime SystemsOOPSLA at Salon F
Chair(s): Martin Hirzel IBM Research
10:30
22m
Talk
Tardis: Affordable Time-Travel Debugging in Managed Runtimes
OOPSLA
Earl T. Barr University College London, Mark Marron Microsoft Research
Link to publication
10:52
22m
Talk
Phosphor: Illuminating Dynamic Data Flow in Commodity JVMs
OOPSLA
Jonathan Bell Columbia University, Gail Kaiser Columbia University, New York
Link to publication Media Attached
11:15
22m
Talk
Rubah: DSU for Java on a stock JVM
OOPSLA
Luís Pina Technical University of Lisbon / INESC-ID, Luís Veiga INESC-ID / Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Michael Hicks University of Maryland, College Park
Link to publication
11:37
22m
Talk
Fast Conservative Garbage Collection
OOPSLA
Rifat Shahriyar Australian National University, Steve Blackburn Australian National University , Kathryn S McKinley Microsoft Research
Link to publication