Question regarding the need for From/To spaces (vs. simply compacting).

Dawid Weiss dawid.weiss at gmail.com
Wed Jun 23 17:01:41 UTC 2010


Thanks guys! Slapping my forehead right now -- I made the wrong
assumption that a copying GC would do THE SAME job as a
marking/compacting GC, only move the live objects to a different
memory location. I got it now and the difference is evident and clear,
will pass this knowledge to my friend.

Thanks again for your time, it's been very helpful.

Dawid


On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Tony Printezis
<tony.printezis at oracle.com> wrote:
> Dawid,
>
> Hi. This is a good question that I get asked quite frequently. The main
> reason is that a copying GC is much faster in garbage collecting a space
> than a sliding compacting GC when the percentage of live objects is small.
>
> A copying GC typically only visits the live objects in the space that is
> being GCed (it starts form the roots and keeps copying objects as it
> discovers them to be live). On the other hand a sliding compacting GC would
> typically visit both the live objects (twice!) and the garbage objects in
> the space that is being GCed (if first marks all the live objects, then
> sweeps over the space visiting all objects and moves the live ones). There
> are of course variations on these two techniques, but the above is the main
> trade-off between them.
>
> So, if the space that is being GCed is sparse with live objects (and this is
> the assumption for the young generation), then a copying GC will always win
> in how much work it needs to do and how much memory it needs to access over
> a compacting GC. I had done some experiments in the past to see how good I
> could make a compacting GC and I couldn't get to anything better than twice
> as slow as a copying GC for the young gen. Of course, lots of things have
> changed since then (workloads / architectures / etc.) so maybe we need to
> redo those. But I would be surprised if I get largely different results
> today.
>
> Anyway, hope this helps,
>
> Tony, HS GC Group
>
> Dawid Weiss wrote:
>>
>> Hello there,
>>
>> A friend of mine asked me a question that I couldn't find any sensible
>> answer for both in literature, on the Web and by browsing through
>> OpenJDK source code (but this, I admit, is not easy considering the
>> volume of code there). The question is:
>>
>> "Why is the young gen. split between to/from spaces, so that the GC
>> must copy everything back and forth between two memory regions if only
>> a single monolithic space would suffice for compacting live objects?"
>>
>> The only thing I could tell him was that this design decision could be
>> motivated by the fact that:
>>
>> - the implementation is simplified since the copied objects end up
>> either in the TO space or are promoted somewhere else (in case of a
>> generational GC),
>> - the implementation may be paralellized to compact concurrently and
>> then merge the compacted segments (assumption by looking at
>> psYoungGen.cpp's move_and_update method).
>>
>> No other clues from me. If I'm missing something obvious (which is
>> probably the case), then an RTFM with a pointer would be great.
>>
>> Dawid
>>
>



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