Partial Marking GC

Abstract

Garbage collection (GC) normally causes pause of execution. Parallel GC has a great potential for real time (non-disruptive) processing. A traditional parallel mark and sweep GC algorithm has, however, well known disadvantages. In this paper, we propose a new GC scheme called Partial Marking GC (PMGC) which is a valiant of generational GC. We implemented a Lisp interpreter with PMGC on a general purpose multi-CPU workstation. As a result, in the best case, PMGC is provided to be twice as efficient as the original algorithm. PMGC is very effective for implementing practical parallel GC.