Garbage collection for embedded systems

Abstract

Security concerns on embedded devices like cellular phones make Java an extremely attractive technology for providing third-party and user-downloadable functionality. However, garbage collectors have typically required several times the maximum live data set size (which is the minimum possible heap size) in order to run well. In addition, the size of the virtual machine (ROM) image and the size of the collector's data structures (metadata) have not been a concern for server- or workstation-oriented collectors. We have implemented two different collectors specifically designed to operate well on small embedded devices. We have also developed a number of algorithmic improvements and compression techniques that allow us to eliminate almost all of the per-object overhead that the virtual machine and the garbage collector require. We describe these optimizations and present measurements of the Java embedded benchmarks (EEMBC) of our implementations on both an IA32 laptop and an ARM-based PDA. For applications with low to moderate allocation rates, our optimized collector running on the ARM is able to achieve 85% of peak performance with only 1.05 to 1.3 times the absolute minimum heap size. For applications with high allocation rates, the collector achieves 85% of peak performance with 1.75 to 2.5 times the minimum heap size. The collector code takes up 40 KB of ROM, and collector metadata overhead has been almost completely eliminated, consuming only 0.4% of the heap. Copyright 2004 ACM.