Reducing Sweep Time for a Nearly Empty Heap

摘要

Mark and sweep garbage collectors are known for using time proportional to the heap size when sweeping memory, since all objects in the heap, regardless of whether they are live or not, must be vistied in order to reclaim the memory occupied by dead objects. This paper introduces a sweeping method which traverses only the live objects, so that sweeping can be done in time dependent only on the number of live objects in the heap.