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The economics of garbage collection

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Published:05 June 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that economic theory can improve our understanding of memory management. We introduce the allocation curve, as an analogue of the demand curve from microeconomics. An allocation curve for a program characterises how the amount of garbage collection activity required during its execution varies in relation to the heap size associated with that program. The standard treatment of microeconomic demand curves (shifts and elasticity) can be applied directly and intuitively to our new allocation curves. As an application of this new theory, we show how allocation elasticity can be used to control the heap growth rate for variable sized heaps in Jikes RVM.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ISMM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 international symposium on Memory management
    June 2010
    140 pages
    ISBN:9781450300544
    DOI:10.1145/1806651
    • General Chair:
    • Jan Vitek,
    • Program Chair:
    • Doug Lea
    • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 45, Issue 8
      ISMM '10
      August 2010
      129 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/1837855
      Issue’s Table of Contents

    Copyright © 2010 ACM

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 5 June 2010

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    Overall Acceptance Rate72of156submissions,46%

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