| In this work, we try to analyze the automatic memory management in Java. We first present a survey on basic allocation and garbage collection algorithms. Then, we present benchmark results on six garbage collectors implemented in different Java virtual machines. We unexpectedly found that a rather simple mark-and-sweep garbage collector in LaTTe JVM performs equally well or better than highly sophisticated collectors that implement a set of garbage collection algorithms in recent Sun's Java implementations. In order to explain this excellent performance, we reverse engineered the code of LaTTe's memory management system, which enabled us to better understand it, to find the features that add to its efficiency, to suggest possible improvements on the present algorithm and other garbage collection algorithms interesting for implementation and testing. In the future, we would like to be able to implement suggested improvements and algorithms for memory management in LaTTe and to compare their efficiency to the present one. |
