Improving locality of reference in a garbage-collecting memory management system
- 1 September 1988
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 31 (9) , 1128-1138
- https://doi.org/10.1145/48529.48536
Abstract
Modern Lisp systems make heavy use of a garbage-collecting style of memory management. Generally, the locality of reference in garbage-collected systems has been very poor. In virtual memory systems, this poor locality of reference generally causes a large amount of wasted time waiting on page faults or uses excessively large amounts of main memory. An adaptive memory management algorithm, described in this article, allows substantial improvement in locality of reference. Performance measurements indicate that page-wait time typically is reduced by a factor of four with constant memory size and disk technology. Alternately, the size of memory typically can be reduced by a factor of two with constant performance.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- Garbage collection in a large LISP systemPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1984
- A real-time garbage collector based on the lifetimes of objectsCommunications of the ACM, 1983
- Garbage Collection of Linked Data StructuresACM Computing Surveys, 1981
- List processing in real time on a serial computerCommunications of the ACM, 1978