Time-Triggered Garbage Collection - Robust And Adaptive Real-Time Gc Scheduling For Embedded Systems

The advent of Java and similar languages on the real-time system scene necessitates the development of efficient strategies for scheduling the work of a garbage collector in a non-intrusive way. We propose a scheduling strategy, time-triggered garbage collection, based on assigning the collector a deadline for when it must complete its current cycle.We show that a time-triggered CC with fixed deadline can have equal or better real-time performance than an allocation-triggered CC, which is the standard approach to real-time CC. Also, by using a deadline-based approach, the CC scheduling and, consequently, real-time performance, is independent of a complex and error-prone CC work metric.Time-triggered CC allows a more high-level view on CC scheduling; we look at the CC cycle level rather than at the individual work increments. This makes it possible to schedule CC as any other thread. It is also suitable for making the CC auto-tuning by dynamically adjusting its deadline as necessary.We have implemented our approach in a run-time system for Java and present experimental data to support the practical feasibility of the approach.