Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management

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Published on 2010-06-05T22:17:47Z Indexed on 2010/06/05 22:22 UTC
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I found this article here:

Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf

In the conclusion section, it reads:

Comparing runtime, space consumption, and virtual memory footprints over a range of benchmarks, we show that the runtime performance of the best-performing garbage collector is competitive with explicit memory management when given enough memory. In particular, when garbage collection has five times as much memory as required, its runtime performance matches or slightly exceeds that of explicit memory management. However, garbage collection’s performance degrades substantially when it must use smaller heaps. With three times as much memory, it runs 17% slower on average, and with twice as much memory, it runs 70% slower. Garbage collection also is more susceptible to paging when physical memory is scarce. In such conditions, all of the garbage collectors we examine here suffer order-of-magnitude performance penalties relative to explicit memory management.

So, if my understanding is correct: if I have an app written in native C++ requiring 100 MB of memory, to achieve the same performance with a "managed" (i.e. garbage collector based) language (e.g. Java, C#), the app should require 5*100 MB = 500 MB? (And with 2*100 MB = 200 MB, the managed app would run 70% slower than the native app?)

Do you know if current (i.e. latest Java VM's and .NET 4.0's) garbage collectors suffer the same problems described in the aforementioned article? Has the performance of modern garbage collectors improved?

Thanks.

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