A survey on object cache locality in automated memory management systems

Automated memory management systems greatly decrease the complexity of writing computer programs by removing the memory layer from the programmer´s perspective. This leads to additional overhead for the programming language as it needs to incorporate mechanics in order to manage the program´s memory. All objects that are no longer reachable are considered to be dead. The memory used by dead objects must be freed. This process is referred to as garbage and hence these programming languages usually incorporate a garbage collector which performs the aforementioned tasks. The layout of the objects in memory greatly affects the performance of the program, as some layouts may result in more cache misses. This survey portrays the current state of the art on the topic of object cache locality in automated memory management systems. With the increasing usage of automated memory management systems, such as virtual machines, research has been focused on improving the performance of these systems.