Are generational garbage collectors inherently cache-friendly?

Problem Detail: 

A typical generational garbage collector keeps recently allocated data in a separate memory region. In typical programs, a lot of data is short-lived, so collecting young garbage (a minor GC cycle) frequently and collecting old garbage infrequently is a good compromise between memory overhead and time spent doing GC.

Intuitively, the benefit of a generational garbage collector compared with a single-region collector should increase as the latency ratio of main memory relative to cache increases, because the data in the young region is accessed often and kept all in one place. Do experimental results corroborate this intuition?

Asked By : Gilles

Answered By : Matt Balkam

Here are a few papers that talk about the cache implications of generational garbage collectors:

• Caching Considerations for Generational Garbage Collection
• The Effect of Garbage Collection on Cache Performance

From what I can gather, the primary issue is that garbage collected systems trade off space in memory to avoid up front collection. The same thing applies to cache memory. As you suggested, the things in the first generation are most likely going to be sitting in cache, and so their allocation and collection will be much faster than something in main memory, or paged out to disk. The main issue is the size of the first generation with respect to the size of your cache. If your cache fills up before the first generation does, then you start to lose those benefits as the misses start piling up.

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/495