Garbage Collection in Software Performance Engineering

Title Garbage Collection in Software Performance Engineering Author Peter Libič peter.libic@d3s.mff.cuni.cz Advisor doc. Ing. Petr Tůma, Dr. petr.tuma@d3s.mff.cuni.cz Department Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University Malostranské nám. 25, 118 00 Prague, Czech Republic Abstract The increasing popularity of languages with automatic memory management makes the garbage collector (GC) performance key to effective application execution. Unfortunately, performance behavior of contemporary GC is not well understood by the application developers and often ignored by the per- formance model designers. In this thesis, we (1) evaluate nature of GC overhead with respect to its effect on accuracy of performance models. We assess the possibility to model GC overhead as a black-box and identify workload characteristics that contribute to GC performance. Then we (2) design an analytical model of one-generation collector and a simulation model of both one-generation and two-generation collectors. These models rely on application characteristics. We evaluate the accuracy of such models and perform an analysis of their sensitivity to the inputs. Using the model we expose the gap between under- standing the GC overhead based on knowing the algorithm..