Project proposal: Shenandoah

[Roman Kennke]

I'd like to discuss the creation of the project Shenandoah with myself
*and/or* Christine Flood as initial lead and the Hotspot group as
sponsoring group.

It's aim is to implement a new garbage collector that reduces GC pause
times for applications that require really large heaps. Existing GCs
show pause times of several 100ms up to several seconds on heaps >
100GB. That is because they need to stop all Java threads for compacting
the heap. Shenandoah implements a new algorithm that allows to compact
heap without stopping the Java threads, and thus make pause times
unrelated to the heap size.

Shenandoah has so far been developed as part of the IcedTea project:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/Shenandoah