Secrets of the Shenandoah garbage collector
GOTOpia Europe 2020

Wednesday Sep 16
16:00 –
16:40
Room 3

Secrets of the Shenandoah garbage collector



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The Shenandoah garbage collector (GC) comes with the promise of pause times of less than 10ms. To achieve this, the collector performs the majority of its work concurrently, consequently impacting the throughput of the application.

Work-stealing allows us to reduce the amount of time and resources spent on garbage collection by redistributing tasks among GC threads, reducing overall runtime.

Stephanie's work with Shenandoah led her to re-examine the assumptions that inform current work-stealing algorithms — with some surprising results.

You'll learn:

  • What work-stealing is and how it's used to redistribute tasks within a GC cycle
  • Interesting GC fundamentals
  • What's really going on behind the scenes in the JVM

Join Stephanie for this fascinating deep dive into a few GC secrets.