Evaluating Garbage Collectors for Large Persistent Stores

We present some results and raise some issues regarding benchmarks for evaluating garbage collection in persistent distributed stores. We believe that such issues are relevant due to increasing research activity in this domain. Therefore, defining widely accepted benchmarks to evaluate the performance and impact of garbage collection solutions is urgent. Currently, the performance of garbage collectors is measured using synthetic, often unportable and/or controversial benchmarks, making the relative evaluation of each solution almost impossible. In addition, there is a lack of knowledge on the behavior of real applications, e.g., amount of garbage, rate of death, etc. This paper outlines our experience on benchmarking our prototypes. We also report what we think is relevant to measure and which missing information we would like to obtain