This project explores techniques for automatic storage reclamation, especially for real-time and distributed systems. It compares techniques for incremental garbage collection in terms of efficiency, real-time guarantees, and performance for distributed data. The focus is on techniques that support high-performance on standard hardware, and standard compiler optimizations. The three major phases of the project are; (1) implementation and evaluation of a new real-time uniprocessor garbage collection algorithm which provides better real-time guarantees than incremental copying due to weaker coupling between the application and the garbage collector, (2) extensions of the algorithm for near real-time systems where some real-time guarantees can be sacrificed for higher performance, and (3) application of these incremental techniques as local garbage collectors in a distributed garbage collection system, where they will enable higher performance garbage collection of poorly distributed data.
