Avoid collecting young gen while doing the full GC

[Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna]

Parallel Compact does the same.

Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna wrote:
> I just checked, and ...
> 
> Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna wrote:
>> Good point. You'd think that the current compacting collectors would
>> do this (either in the pointer update phase or as you suggest the 
>> short-cut
>> of conditionally dirtying the entire old and perm gens) if the compacted
>> data did not all fit in the old gen and some of it overflowed into
>> young. I haven't looked at the code in a while, and I wonder which
> 
> ... (Serial) mark-compact (at least) does the latter. (Probably makes 
> sense in most
> conventional scenarios where overflow is rare.) John if you are reading 
> this
> perhaps you can tell us what parallel compact does? (Or i'll eventually 
> get around to
> looking at it :-)
> 
> -- ramki
> 
>> (if either, yikes!) is actually done. I'll take a look when i get
>> some free time unless someone else gets to it first ;-)
>>
>> -- ramki
>>
>> Tony Printezis wrote:
>>> Tony,
>>>
>>> You also have to make sure that the card table (the data structure 
>>> that keeps track of old-to-young refs) is left consistent at the end 
>>> of the GCs. So, as you move old objects that point to the young gen, 
>>> you might have to update the card table accordingly. An easy way to 
>>> do that (good to at least make sure that the rest of the 
>>> implementation is working correctly) is to dirty the cards of the 
>>> entire old gen. This will make the next young GCs really slow, but 
>>> the young collector should deal with it correctly and clean up the 
>>> card table as necessary.
>>>
>>> I'm also curious why you want to do this. My wild guess would be that 
>>> you're maybe using a huge young gen, relatively to the old gen, and 
>>> as a result it's better to let the young collector deal with it 
>>> rather than compacting it (which would be much slower).
>>>
>>> Tony
>>>
>>> Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna wrote:
>>>> Hi Tony --
>>>>
>>>> On 03/23/10 10:57, Tony Guan wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> In my current project, one crazy idea is to leave the young generation
>>>>> untouched(not collected) during a Full Gc. Is it feasible if I want to
>>>>> collect the tenured gen only in a full GC?
>>>>>
>>>>> To do this, the young gen should be included as part of the root set,
>>>>> and the reference processor should only care about the old gen. Is
>>>>> there anything else I should take care of?
>>>>
>>>> Yes, i believe that should work. (In fact, the CMS collector, which 
>>>> collects
>>>> only the old gen and perm gen, does pretty much that. There are some 
>>>> disadvantages
>>>> to it though, for example, dead objects in the young gen possibly 
>>>> keeping
>>>> objects in old and perm gen artificially alive, but such cases are 
>>>> probably
>>>> rare.)
>>>>
>>>> Just out of curiosity, when and wny would you want to not collect 
>>>> the young gen?
>>>>
>>>> -- ramki
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>>
>>>>> Tony
>>>>
>>
>