Address Fragment-Compact Garbage Collection

A garbage collection algorithm. Address fragment-compact (AFC) is discussed in this paper. The algorithm is based on address sort-compact (ASC) algorithm. AFC algorithm operates in two stages: the object scanning stage and the heap compacting stage. During object scanning, the addresses of the live objects are added to the fragment ordered address queue without sorting, the addresses of the pointers pointing to the live objects are added to the deference set. In the compacting stage, the live objects are moved to the lower end of the heap in different ways according to their sizes. As AFC does not sort the addresses of the objects and updates the deference set in just one pass, it is more efficient than ASC. Test shows that the pause time of AFC is 30% up to 50% shorter than that of ASC while saves 50% to 60% memory compared with ASC.