A HIGH-PERFORMANCE HARDWARE-ASSISTED REAL-TIME GARBAGE COLLECTION SYSTEM

The benefits of high-performance garbage collection include improved programmer productivity, improved software reliability, and, due to increases in expressive power, increased program functionality. The hardware-assisted garbage collection system described supports dynamic memory allocation efficiency that is approximately five times greater than the efficiency of typical implementations of C's malloc and free functions. Though occasional memory fetch and store operations are delayed by up to 1 mus (six memory cycles), the average time required to respond to a memory operation is nearly indistinguishable from that required for traditional memory. The worst-case time required to allocate a new object is less than 1 mus (two memory cycles), regardless of the object's size. Periodically, at predictable times, application processing is suspended by approximately 500 mus (16k CPU cycles) while the CPU flushes its cache in preparation for the start of another garbage collection pass.