Friday, February 10, 2012

Practical Garbage Collection

Incremental collection

Incremental in a garbage collection context refers to dividing up the work that needs to be done in smaller chunks, often with the aim of pausing the applications for multiple brief periods instead of a single long pause. The behavior of the generational collector described above is partially incremental in the sense that the young generation collectors constitute incremental work. However, as a whole, the collection process is not incremental because of the full heap collections incurred when the old generation becomes full.
Other forms of incremental collections are possible; for example, a collector can do a tiny bit of garbage collection work for every allocation performed by the application. The concept is not tied to a particular implementation strategy.

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