Big Data applications suffer from unpredictable and unacceptably high pause times due to Garbage Collection (GC). This is the case in latency-sensitive applications such as on-line credit-card fraud detection, graph-based computing for analysis on social networks, etc. Such pauses compromise latency requirements of the whole application stack and result from applications' aggressive buffering caching of data, exposing an ill-suited GC design, which assumes that most objects will die young and does not consider that applications hold large amounts of middle-lived data in memory. To avoid such pauses, we propose NG2C, a new GC algorithm that combines pretenuring with an N-Generational heap. By being able to allocate objects into different generations, NG2C is able to group objects with similar lifetime profiles in the same generation. By allocating objects with similar lifetime profiles close to each other, i.e. in the same generation, we avoid object promotion (copying between generations) and heap fragmentation (which leads to heap compactions) both responsible for most of the duration of HotSpot GC pause times. NG2C is implemented for the OpenJDK 8 HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, as an extension of the Garbage First GC. We evaluate NG2C using Cassandra, Lucene, and GraphChi with three different GCs: Garbage First (G1), Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS), and NG2C. Results show that NG2C decreases the worst observable GC pause time by up to 94.8 for Cassandra, 85.0 for Lucene and 96.45 for GraphChi, when compared to current collectors (G1 and CMS). In addition, NG2C has no negative impact on application throughput or memory usage.
@cite_58: This paper presents the design and implementation of a “quasi real-time” garbage collector for Concurrent Caml Light, an implementation of ML with threads. This two-generation system combines a fast, asynchronous copying collector on the young generation with a non-disruptive concurrent marking collector on the old generation. This design crucially relies on the ML compile-time distinction between mutable and immutable objects.
Other region-based collectors @cite_58 use thread-local allocation regions to allocate objects. This approach also does not support more complex models where most large data structures can be maintained by multiple threads (for example, Cassandra's in-memory tables).