A Highly Effective Partition Selection Policy for Object Database Garbage Collection

We investigate methods to improve the performance of algorithms for automatic storage reclamation of object databases. These algorithms are based on a technique called partitioned garbage collection, in which a subset of the entire database is collected independently of the rest. We evaluate how different application, database system, and garbage collection implementation parameters affect the performance of garbage collection in object database systems. We focus specifically on investigating the policy that is used to select which partition in the database should be collected. Three of the policies that we investigate are based on the intuition that the values of overwritten pointers provide good hints about where to find garbage. A fourth policy investigated chooses the partition with the greatest presence in the I/O buffer. Using simulations based on a synthetic database, we show that one of our policies requires less I/O to collect more garbage than any existing implementable policy. Furthermore, that policy performs close to a locally optimal policy over a wide range of simulation parameters, including database size, collection rate, and database connectivity. We also show what impact these simulation parameters have on application performance and investigate the expected costs and benefits of garbage collection in such systems.