Garbage Collection for the Delft Java Processor

This report addresses the garbage collection problem in Java in general and in the Delft Java Processor in particular. First a special Java runtime environment, containing a reference counting collector, is implemented aiming at analyzing the general features of dynamic memory allocation of Java programs. Object lifetime, size, and type analysis are performed on the SPEC JVM98 benchmark suite using this special Java runtime environment and the results are interpreted from the garbage collection point of view. The results suggest that high performance garbage collection for Java has to be generational and include memory compaction. Special treatment for objects like Strings which are very frequent in Java programs can be adopted