ADAPTIVE GARBAGE COLLECTION AND EXPERIMENTS FOR IMPLEMENTATION

In the list processing language, dynamic memory management is indispen sable, and hence various methods have been proposed. In one such metho d, the object is discriminated according to its life, time and garbage collection (GC) is applied efficiently to the unnecessary object, bas ed on a preset ''threshold.'' A problem is how the threshold should be set in order to realize the most efficient GC. This paper points out that the threshold that realizes the highest efficiency depends on the application to be executed, and proposes the technique of adaptive ga rbage collection (AGC). An experiment toward its implementation is rep orted. AGC is a kind of GC which adjusts the threshold dynamically acc ording to memory use, so that efficient operation is realized for a va riety of applications. Experiments aiming at the realization of AGC sh ow that applications have their own pace in consuming the memory, and the optimal value of the threshold is related to that pace. It is seen also that the memory-consuming pace of the application is related clo sely to the data in the interpreter, leading to the definition of the useful parameter for realizing the efficient AGC.