Big Data applications suffer from unpredictable and unacceptably high pause times due to Garbage Collection (GC). This is the case in latency-sensitive applications such as on-line credit-card fraud detection, graph-based computing for analysis on social networks, etc. Such pauses compromise latency requirements of the whole application stack and result from applications' aggressive buffering caching of data, exposing an ill-suited GC design, which assumes that most objects will die young and does not consider that applications hold large amounts of middle-lived data in memory. To avoid such pauses, we propose NG2C, a new GC algorithm that combines pretenuring with an N-Generational heap. By being able to allocate objects into different generations, NG2C is able to group objects with similar lifetime profiles in the same generation. By allocating objects with similar lifetime profiles close to each other, i.e. in the same generation, we avoid object promotion (copying between generations) and heap fragmentation (which leads to heap compactions) both responsible for most of the duration of HotSpot GC pause times. NG2C is implemented for the OpenJDK 8 HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, as an extension of the Garbage First GC. We evaluate NG2C using Cassandra, Lucene, and GraphChi with three different GCs: Garbage First (G1), Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS), and NG2C. Results show that NG2C decreases the worst observable GC pause time by up to 94.8 for Cassandra, 85.0 for Lucene and 96.45 for GraphChi, when compared to current collectors (G1 and CMS). In addition, NG2C has no negative impact on application throughput or memory usage.
Opposed to previous works such as the Beltway framework @cite_21 and the Mature Object Space collector @cite_57 , does not promote copy objects gradually through older generations since this only generates more object copying (which we are trying to avoid). Instead, objects are pretenured based on the object lifetime profile.
@cite_57 @cite_21
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We present the design and implementation of a new garbage collection framework that significantly generalizes existing copying collectors. The Beltway framework exploits and separates object age and incrementality. It groups objects in one or more increments on queues called belts, collects belts independently, and collects increments on a belt in first-in-first-out order. We show that Beltway configurations, selected by command line options, act and perform the same as semi-space, generational, and older-first collectors, and encompass all previous copying collectors of which we are aware. The increasing reliance on garbage collected languages such as Java requires that the collector perform well. We show that the generality of Beltway enables us to design and implement new collectors that are robust to variations in heap size and improve total execution time over the best generational copying collectors of which we are aware by up to 40 , and on average by 5 to 10 , for small to moderate heap sizes. New garbage collection algorithms are rare, and yet we define not just one, but a new family of collectors that subsumes previous work. This generality enables us to explore a larger design space and build better collectors. Many modern garbage collectors are generational, operating under the assumption that "most objects die young." Such collectors allocate all objects in a frequently collected nursery and tenure only surviving objects to a less-frequently collected, older generation. But these survivors induce copying costs upon tenuring. To avoid these costs, pretenuring schemes construct classifiers to predict whether an object will be long-lived or short-lived; accordingly, it is tenured or not immediately upon allocation. Up to now, however, these predictions did not account for one important fact: the proximity of the next collection. In contrast, headroom-based pretenuring does take this into account; thus, it can dynamically pretenure objects whenever they live "long enough." We devised two ways to estimate an object's lifetime from garbage collection traces. This led to two headroom-based pre-tenuring schemes, which we implemented on top of Jikes RVM and MMTk. Our experiments show that the dynamic, headroom-based pretenuring schemes outperform static schemes in terms of collector performance, albeit at the cost of increased mutator overhead. Pretenuring long-lived and immortal objects into infrequently or never collected regions reduces garbage collection costs significantly. However, extant approaches either require computationally expensive, application-specific, off-line profiling, or consider only allocation sites common to all programs, i.e. invoked by the virtual machine rather than application programs. In contrast, we show how a simple program analysis, combined with an object lifetime knowledge bank, can be exploited to match both runtime system and application program structure with object lifetimes. The complexity of the analysis is linear in the size of the program, so need not be run ahead of time. We obtain performance gains between 6-77 in GC timeallagainst a generational copying collector for several SPEC jvm98 programs. This paper introduces dynamic object colocation, an optimization to reduce copying costs in generational and other incremental garbage collectors by allocating connected objects together in the same space. Previous work indicates that connected objects belong together because they often have similar lifetimes. Generational collectors, however, allocate all new objects in a nursery space. If these objects are connected to data structures residing in the mature space, the collector must copy them. Our solution is a cooperative optimization that exploits compiler analysis to make runtime allocation decisions. The compiler analysis discovers potential object connectivity for newly allocated objects. It then replaces these allocations with calls to coalloc, which takes an extra parameter called the colocator object. At runtime, coalloc determines the location of the colocator and allocates the new object together with it in either the nursery or mature space. Unlike pretenuring, colocation makes precise per-object allocation decisions and does not require lifetime analysis or allocation site homogeneity. Experimental results for SPEC Java benchmarks using Jikes RVM show colocation can reduce garbage collection time by 50 to 75 , and total performance by up to 1 .