An efficient garbage collection in java virtual machine via swap I/O optimization

Abstract

© 2020 ACM.Various applications, frameworks, and services are built on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) (e.g., Big data analytics) due to its cross-platform portability. However, many of them suffer from long latency of Garbage Collection (GC) which also drops throughput, efficiency, and availability of the system. For example, when clients demand larger memory than available system memory, Operating System (OS) usually uses its swap space to release the space by evicting some inactive contents stored in memory. In this case, GC latency can be longer due to the I/O time (i.e., swap in/out). In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the existing GC policy in JVM. Based on the result of analysis, we propose an efficient GC scheme to improve the GC performance via swap I/O optimization to complement the existing GC policy. In this scheme, we selectively compact JVM heap by interacting with OS swap system during GC. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme reduces overall GC overhead by 77.5% and improves the throughput by 82.5% respectively.