Using Prefetching to Improve Reference-Counting Garbage Collectors

Reference counting is a classical garbage collection method. Recently, a series of papers have extended the basic method to drastically reduce its notorious overhead and extend the basic method to run concurrently and efficiently on a modern computing platform. In this paper we investigate the use of prefetching to further improve the efficiency of the reference-counting collector. We propose potential prefetching opportunities for the advanced reference-counting collector and report an implementation of a collector that employs such prefetching. The proposed prefetch instructions were inserted into the Jikes referencecounting collector obtaining an average reduction of 8.7% of the memory management overheads.