

Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my CS thesis subject - jdecuyper

I'm about to start my CS master degree's final project. I'm planning to focus on a Garbage Collector running inside a heavy heap context and I would like to have HN people's perspective on it and know how relevant they find it.<p>I think that one of the biggest challenge the GC will have to face in the following months/years is the increase in size of the managed heap memory. Patrick Dussud, one the main developer of Microsoft .NET's GC, mentioned in a podcast (http://www.microsoftpdc.com/2009/FT51) that heaps overs 15 GB could, at this time, cause some serious GC latencies.<p>There already exists commercial Java based solutions, such as Terracotta's big memory solution 
(http://www.terracotta.org/bigmemory?src=/index.html), that offers up to 600GB of memory off-heap with no pause time caused by the GC.<p>I'm planning to work on Mono's generational GC. My approach would be to identify in which specific conditions the GC starts presenting latencies and look for solutions that would allow it to manage bigger heaps.<p>Thanks you very much!
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wmf
Before you start, look at the work Azul is doing in this area.

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jdecuyper
Great recommendation. Thanks a lot.

