A High-Performance Architecture for Real-Time Garbage Collection

Hardware-assisted garbage collection offers the potential of high average-case allocation rates and memory bandwidth, with very low worst-case allocation, fetch, and store times. This paper describes an architecture that allows memory fetch and store operations to execute, on the average, nearly as fast as traditional memory. The architecture is high-performance in that it includes support for caching of garbage-collected memory cells. The architecture is real-time in that the worst-case time required for a memory fetch or store is approximately six traditional memory cycles, and the time required to allocate an object is bounded by a small constant times the size of the object. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been successfully simulated. Continuing research focuses on measuring the system’s performance under real workloads.