Caching considerations for generational garbage collection

Abstract

Smalltalk, Lisp, or actor languages typically violate some of the basic lo- Appears in Proc. 1992 ACM Conf. on Lisp and Functional Programming, San Francisco, California, June 2224, 1992, pp. 32--42. This and other papers on garbage collection, memory hierarchies, and persistence are available via anonymous internet ftp from cs.utexas.edu, in the directory pub/garbage. cality assumptions of modern memory hierarchies, leading to poor performance of normal caching strategies. The main problem is cyclic reuse of memory at a time scale too long to be captured by any caching policy. These systems therefore tend toward being bandwidthlimited, i.e., dependent on the speed of transfers between levels of the memory hierarchy. 2.1 Allocation is the problem, not garbage collection per se The problem of locality in garbage collected systems does not depend primarily on the locality of the garbage collectio