Real-Time Garbage Collection of Actors

Washabaugh, Douglas M. and Kafura, Dennis G. (1990) Real-Time Garbage Collection of Actors. Technical Report TR-90-24, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

This paper shows how to perform real-time automatic garbage collection of objects possessing their own thread of control. Beyond its interest as a novel real-time problem, the relevance of automatic management and concurrent objects to real-time applications is briefly discussed. The specific model of concurrent objects used in the paper is explained. A definition of real-time garbage collection is given and an algorithm satisfying this definition is described. An analysis of the relationship between latency, memory overhead and system size shows that this approach is immediately feasible for low-performance real-time systems or multi-processor real-time systems with dedicated processor functions. Future improvements in the collector's performance are outlined.