Performance evaluation of embedded garbage collectors in CVM environment

Abstract

Garbage collection in the Java virtual machine is a core function that relieves application programmers of difficulties related to memory management. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GenGC and GenRGC, garbage collectors for the embedded Java virtual machine, CVM. To compare the performance of GenGC and GenRGC, we first evaluate the execution time of garbage collection and the delay time caused by garbage collection. Second, for more detailed performance analysis of GenRGC, we evaluate the execution time of garbage collection and the delay time caused by garbage collection while changing the sizes of a block and a frame. Third, we analyze the size of storage space required for performing GenRGC, and show GenRGC to be suitable for embedded environment with a limited amount of memory. Since CVM is the most representative one of embedded Java virtual machines, this performance study is quite meaningful in that we can predict the performance of garbage collectors in real application environments more accurately.