Adaptive Scheduling of Incremental Copying Garbage Collection for Interactive Applications

Incremental algorithms are often used to interleave the work of a garbage collector with the execution of an application program, the intention being to avoid long pauses. However, overestimating the worst-case storage needs of the program often causes all the garbage collection work to be performed in the beginning of the garbage collection cycles, slowing down the application program to an unwanted degree. This paper explores an approach to distributing the work more evenly over the garbage collection cycle.