Automatic Selection of Application Specific Garbage Collectors

Garbage collection is the process of automatic memory reclamation or automatic storage reclamation. In this process those objects that are not referenced from any live object or from root are collected. These objects are known as dead objects. The memory occupied by these dead objects is collected and added to the pool of free memory for further allocation to new objects. The program thread which performs these tasks is known as Garbage collector (GC). Several algorithms were proposed for garbage collection. Each one has its own niche in terms of garbage collection. The main objective of each algorithm was to prevent the OutOfMemory exception. Research was also done to reduce the application execution time and increase the throughput. Several researchers also work for the automatic selection of GC based on the behavior of application. They performed experiments considering only two metrics, application execution time and throughput.