Low Pause-Time Garbage Collection Written Preliminary Examination II

Garbage collection prevents security vulnerabilities that can otherwise be caused by incorrect man-ual memory management at the cost of increased runtime and space overheads. In some domains, the runtime overhead and unpredictable, lengthy pauses for garbage collection could be deemed unaccept-able. Decades of research have proposed incremental, concurrent, and generational garbage collection as possible solutions for decreasing the runtime performance overheads and unpredictable application behavior caused by garbage collection. In this report, we survey three modern garbage collectors that attempt to limit application pauses and provide acceptable runtime performance in their respective do-mains. Schism [8] targets real-time applications, C4 [10] targets applications with large heap sizes and fast application response-time requirements, and HAMM [6] provides hardware support for a wide range of software garbage collectors for general-purpose applications.