Scalable Garbage Collection with Guaranteed MMU

Regional garbage collection offers a useful compromise between real-time and generational collection. Regional collectors resemble generational collectors, but are scalable: our main theorem guarantees a positive lower bound, independent of mutator and live storage, for the theoretical worst-case minimum mutator utilization (MMU). The theorem also establishes upper bounds for worst-case space usage and collection pauses. Standard generational collectors are not scalable. Some realtime collectors are scalable, while others assume a well-behaved mutator or provide no worst-case guarantees at all. Regional collectors cannot compete with hard real-time collectors at millisecond resolutions, but offer efficiency comparable to contemporary generational collectors combined with improved latency and MMU at resolutions on the order of hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds.

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