Garbage Collection and Threads

Question

AFAIK when a GC is doing its thing the VM blocks all running threads -- or at least when it is compacting the heap. Is this the case in modern implementions of the CLR and

Answer 1

The answer is that this depends on the garbage collection algorithms used. In some cases, you are correct that all threads are stopped during GC. In other cases, you are incorrect in that garbage collection proceeds while normal threads are running. To understand how GC's achieve that, you need a detailed understanding of the theory and terminology of garbage collectors, combined with an understanding of the specific collector. It is simply not amenable to a simple explanation.

Oh yes, and it is worth pointing out that many modern collectors don't have a compaction phase per-se. Rather they work by copying live objects to a new "space" and zeroing the old "space" when they are done.

If I am incorrect my question would be answered by a simple explanation of the strategy used to minimise blocking.

If you really want to understand how garbage collectors work, I recommend:

• "Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management" by Richard Jones.
• "The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management" by Richard Jones, Antony Hosking and Eliot Moss

... and beware that finding accurate, detailed, public descriptions of the internals of production garbage collectors is not easy. (Though in the case of the Hotspot GC's, you can look at the source code ...)

EDIT: in response to the OP's comment ...

"It seems it is as I thought -- there is no getting around the "stop the world" part."

It depends. In the case of the Java 6 Concurrent Collector, there are two pauses during the marking of the roots (including stacks), and then marking / copying of other objects proceeds in parallel. For other kinds of concurrent collector, read or write barriers are used while the collector is running to trap situations where the collector and application threads would otherwise interfere with each other. I don't have my copy of [Jones] here right now, but I also recall that it is possible to make the "stop the world" interval negligible ... at the cost of more expensive pointer operations and/or not collecting all garbage.