A study on promotion of generational GC in ART

Android Runtime (ART) has Garbage Collection (GC) function, which automatically releases unused memories. Generational GC is one of the most important GC improving methods and ART also has a Generation GC implementation, which is called Generational Semi-Space GC (GSS). Generational GC clusters object into two groups. One is objects that will probably die soon. The other is objects that will not. An usual generational GC, such as GSS separates object with its ages. Generational GC expects young and old objects will and will not die soon, respectively. An object is promoted from young object to old object when its age exceeds its threshold. In this paper, we focus on the promoting condition. First, we introduce ART GSS and its promoting condition. Second, we propose a new promoting policy for effective collection. Third, we evaluated our method. Our evaluation demonstrates that the method can decrease memory size consumed by an application without application performance.