Garbage Collections Delays on Java GUIs

Abstract

Tablets, smartphones, wearables, etc. project a (usually graphical) interface to their human users that offloads the majority of the computation to a cloud/fog system. Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications are frequently written in high-level programming languages, which provide automatic memory management: placement and deletion of memory objects is not performed manually; instead, an underlying software component called a Garbage Collector (GC) handles this. Nevertheless, the GC policies and algorithms that are best suited for large datacenters are not necessarily ideal for a small, embedded device. Therefore, in this paper, we present GUI GC, a JavaFX GUI benchmark, which we use to compare the performance of the four GC policies of the IBM J9 Java runtime on a resource-constrained environment. Overall, our experiments suggest that the default policy Gencon, outperformed its counterparts. Additionally, the region-based policy, Balanced, did not fully utilize blocking times; thus, using GUI GC, we conducted experiments with explicit GC invocations that measured significant improvements of up to 13.22% when multiple CPUs were available.