Adaptive, Application-Specific Garbage Collection

In this paper, we describe a novel execution environment that can dynamicallyswitch between garbage collection systems. As such, it enablesselection of the most appropriate allocator and collector fora given application and underlying resource availability. Oursystem is novel in that it is able to switch betweena wide range of diverse collection systems. It uses programannotations to guide selection of the collection system. In addition,it can automatically identify when to switch collectors when programexecution behavior warrants it, i.e., it is adaptive. Our systemintroduces little overhead and accurately identifies the bestcollector for a wide range of benchmarks and heap sizes.