Low-latency, high-throughput garbage collection

To achieve short pauses, state-of-the-art concurrent copying collectors such as C4, Shenandoah, and ZGC use substantially more CPU cycles and memory than simpler collectors. They suffer from design limitations: i) concurrent copying with inherently expensive read and write barriers, ii) scalability limitations due to tracing, and iii) immediacy limitations for mature objects that impose memory overheads.

This paper takes a different approach to optimizing responsiveness and throughput. It uses the insight that regular, brief stop-the-world collections deliver sufficient responsiveness at greater efficiency than concurrent evacuation. It introduces LXR, where stop-the-world collections use reference counting (RC) and judicious copying. RC delivers scalability and immediacy, promptly reclaiming young and mature objects. RC, in a hierarchical Immix heap structure, reclaims most memory without any copying. Occasional concurrent tracing identifies cyclic garbage. LXR introduces: i) RC remembered sets for judicious copying of mature objects; ii) a novel low-overhead write barrier that combines coalescing reference counting, concurrent tracing, and remembered set maintenance; iii) object reclamation while performing a concurrent trace; iv) lazy processing of decrements; and v) novel survival rate triggers that modulate pause durations.

LXR combines excellent responsiveness and throughput, improving over production collectors. On the widely-used Lucene search engine in a tight heap, LXR delivers 7.8× better throughput and 10× better 99.99% tail latency than Shenandoah. On 17 diverse modern workloads in a moderate heap, LXR outperforms OpenJDK's default G1 on throughput by 4% and Shenandoah by 43%.