Reference counting is not naturally suitable for running on multiprocessors. The update of pointers and reference counts requires atomic and synchronized operations. We present a novel reference counting algorithm suitable for a multiprocessor that does not require any synchronized operation in its write barrier (not even a compare-and-swap type of synchronization). The algorithm is efficient and may compete with any tracing algorithm.

With concurrent and garbage collected languages like Java and C# becoming popular, the need for a suitable non-intrusive, efficient, and concurrent multiprocessor garbage collector has become acute. We propose a novel mark and sweep on-the-fly algorithm based on the sliding views mechanism of Levanoni and Petrank. We have implemented our collector on the Jikes Java Virtual Machine running on a Netfinity multiprocessor and compared it to the concurrent algorithm and to the stop-the-world collector supplied with Jikes JVM. The maximum pause time that we measured with our benchmarks over all runs was 2ms. In all runs, the pause times were smaller than those of the stop-the-world collector by two orders of magnitude and they were also always shorter than the pauses of the Jikes concurrent collector. Throughput measurements of the new garbage collector show that it outperforms the Jikes concurrent collector by up to 60%. As expected, the stop-the-world does better than the on-the-fly collectors with results showing about 10% difference. On top of being

We study an incorporation of generations into a modern reference counting collector. We start with the two on-the-y collectors suggested by Levanoni and Petrank: a reference counting collector and a tracing (mark and sweep) collector. We then propose three designs for combining them so that the reference counting collector collects the young generation or the old generation or both. Our designs maintain the good properties of the Levanoni-Petrank collector. In particular, it is adequate for multithreaded environment and a multiprocessor platform, and it has an ecient write barrier with no synchronization operations. To the best of our knowledge, the use of generations with reference counting has not been tried before.

We study concurrent garbage collection via reference counting. While tracing variants of garbage collection have been well studied with respect to concurrency, the study of reference counting has been somewhat behind. The straightforward concurrent version of reference counting is not at all scalable. Furthermore, a more advanced study by DeTreville yielded an algorithm which acquires a single lock per update of a pointer, thus, executing all updates sequentially and hindering the scalability of the algorithm. In this paper we propose a new concurrent reference counting algorithm with several desired properties. First, the algorithm employs extremely fine synchronization. In particular, updates of pointers and creation of objects require no synchronization overhead whatsoever (even not a compare-and-swap type of operation). Furthermore, the algorithm is non-disruptive: the program threads are never stopped simultaneously to cooperate with the...