ParMarksplit: A parallel mark-split garbage collector based on a lock-free skip-list

Abstract

Mark-split is a garbage collection algorithm that combines advantages of both the mark-sweep and the copying collection algorithms. In this paper, we present a parallel mark-split garbage collector (GC). Our parallel design introduces and makes use of an efficient concurrency control mechanism for handling the list of free memory intervals. This mechanism is based on a lock-free skip-list design which supports an extended set of operations. Beside basic operations, it can perform a composite one that can search and remove and also insert two elements atomically. We have implemented the parallel mark-split GC in OpenJDK’s HotSpot virtual machine. We experimentally evaluate our collector and compare it with the default concurrent mark-sweep GC in HotSpot, using the DaCapo benchmarks, on two contemporary multiprocessor systems; one has 12 Intel Nehalem cores with HyperThreading and the other has 48 AMD Bulldozer cores. The evaluation shows that our parallel mark-split keeps the characteristics of the sequential mark-split, that it performs better than the concurrent mark-sweep in applications that have low live/garbage ratio, and have live objects locating contiguously, therefore being marked consecutively. Our parallel mark-split performs significantly better than a trivial parallelization based on locks in terms of both collection time and scalability.