A Comparative Study of Garbage Collection Techniques in Java Virtual Machines

Abstract

Garbage collection mechanisms implemented in Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) are used to reclaim memory allocated to the objects that become inaccessible during program execution. An efficient garbage collection mechanism certainly facilitates in smooth running of an application. This paper performs a comparative analysis of garbage collection techniques implemented in Sun HotSpot, Oracle JRockit and IBM J9 virtual machines. We perform experiments with several benchmarks containing dynamic creation for objects of TreeMap, ArrayList and String array data types. Due to the creation of a large number of big sized memory objects and loss of references, the garbage is created that is collected by the garbage collectors implemented in the virtual machines. The experiments are carried out on different hardware architectures including Intel Core 2 Quad and Intel Xeon based systems. The performance of each garbage collector is computed in terms of the rate of garbage collection that mainly depends upon the strategy implemented for garbage collection. Our results show that the Sun HotSpot garbage collector performs 4.66 times better than the Oracle JRockit and 144.06 times better than the IBM J9 garbage collectors.