Jade: A High-throughput Concurrent Copying Garbage Collector

Garbage collection (GC) pauses are a notorious issue threatening the latency of applications. To mitigate this problem, state-of-the-art concurrent copying collectors allow GC threads to run simultaneously with application threads (mutators) in nearly all GC phases. However, the design of concurrent copying collectors does not always lead to low application latency. To this end, this work studies the behaviors of mainstream concurrent copying collectors in OpenJDK and mainly focuses on long application pauses under heavy workloads. By analyzing the design of those collectors, this work uncovers that lengthy pre-reclamation cycles (including GC phases before actual memory release), high GC frequency, and large metadata maintenance overhead are major factors for long pauses. Therefore, this work proposes Jade, a concurrent copying collector aiming to achieve both short pauses and high GC efficiency. Compared with existing collectors, Jade provides a group-wise collection mechanism to shorten pre-reclamation cycles while controlling GC frequency. It also embraces a generational heap layout and a single-phase algorithm to maximize young GC's throughput. The evaluation results on representative latency-critical applications show that Jade can reach sub-millisecond-level pauses even under heavy workloads and significantly improve applications' peak throughput compared with state-of-the-art concurrent collectors.