The Garbage Collection Handbook

Chapter 19

Real-time garbage collection

The concurrent and incremental garbage collection algorithms of the preceding chapters strive to reduce the pause times perceived by the mutator, by interleaving small increments of collector work on the same processor as the mutator or by running collector work at the same time on another processor. Many of these algorithms were developed with the goal of supporting applications where long pauses result in the application providing degraded service quality (such as jumpy movement of a mouse cursor in a graphical user interface). Thus, early incremental and concurrent collectors were often called ‘real-time’ collectors, but they were real-time only under certain strict conditions (such as restricting the ...