4/18/2000
3:30pm-4:30pm
ECOT 831
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Effectiveness of Garbage Collection and Explicit Deallocation
Grad Student, Computer Science
Garbage collection is the automatic reclamation of heap storage. When
an object is not reachable through pointers anymore, it is declared
"dead" and its memory is reclaimed. In C, you do not know exactly
which values are pointers and which are not. Therefore, the garbage
collector must be conservative, it must not reclaim an object if
anything that looks like a pointer seems to point to it. Other than in
Java or Lisp, in C explicit deallocation (via free()) is more common
than the use of garbage collectors.
For our experiments, we use the Boehm/Demers/Weiser conservative
garbage collector for C. We compare how much memory it reclaims to how
much the explicit deallocation inserted by the programmer reclaims. We
also provide the garbage collector with more accurate
pointer/non-pointer information and see how much this improves its
effectiveness. In most of our benchmarks, the accuracy makes no
difference. For those where it does, we investigate for which memory
area (stack, heap, or global) accurate information is helpful.
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BACTAC, the Beverage And Chips Tuesday Afternoon Colloquium, is a weekly forum
run by graduate students. The goal is provide an informal setting in which
anyone can (basically) present anything. In the past, we have had practice
talks for conferences and job interviews, research reports, juggle lessons (!),
student representative reports, internship discussions, an introduction to
ergonomics, and "pay attention to this when you are going to look for job"
discussions.
BACTAC is meant to be an informal and social event to promote the interaction
among graduate students. BACTAC is typically held every Tuesday, at 3:30pm,
in room ECOT 831. Free munchies and drinks are provided.
Please email Caleb Phillips
for more information or if you want to be a speaker.
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