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Publication
ISMM 2004
Conference paper
Write barrier elision for concurrent garbage collectors
Abstract
Concurrent garbage collectors require write barriers to preserve consistency, but these barriers impose significant direct and indirect costs. While there has been a lot of work on optimizing write barriers, we present the first study of their elision in a concurrent collector. We show conditions under which write barriers are redundant, and describe how these conditions can be applied to both incremental update or snapshot-at-the-beginning barriers. We then evaluate the potential for write barrier elimination with a trace-based limit study, which shows that a significant percentage of write barriers are redundant. On average, 54% of incremental barriers and 83% of snapshot barriers are unnecessary. Copyright 2004 ACM.