REDUCING SPIN COUNT IN WORK-STEALING FOR COPYING GARBAGE COLLECTION BASED ON AVERAGE OBJECT REFERENCES

摘要

A method is provided for controlling a number of Garbage Collection (GC) threads in a computer system implementing a copying GC process which copies live objects and involves states including a spin state, a yield state, and a sleep state. The method includes determining the number of GC threads to come back to for copying with work-stealing from a given one of the states based on a predicted number of object references, responsive to a number of currently stealable tasks being less than a threshold. The predicted number of object references is calculated using a past average number of object references. The method further includes determining the number of GC threads to come back to for copying work from the given one of the states based on the number of currently stealable tasks, responsive to the number of currently stealable tasks being equal to or greater than the threshold.