GC Improvements in JScript for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

Hello Friends,

Today I am going to talk about some of the Garbage Collector improvement we have done. Actually the original fix was done in Script 5.7 (shipped with IE7/Vista and also available on down level platforms), which we further enhanced in JScript shipped with IE8 Beta1.

So if you have gone through the Eric’s post on JScript Garbage Collector, you must have noticed following lines…

Actually what we do is keep track of the number of strings, objects and array slots allocated. We check the current tallies at the beginning of each statement, and when the numbers exceed certain thresholds we trigger a collection. “

“However, there are some down sides as well. Performance is potentially not good on large-working-set applications”.

The three thresholds he talked about were fixed in previous versions of JScript. After each GC cycle, counters were reset to zero. Next time when they hit the thresholds, again GC was triggered and so on.

This was alright for small scripts as they never create lot of strings and objects and don’t take much time to execute. But in modern AJAX applications, lots of objects /strings/array entries are created and they live for long enough time. Since rate of object/string/array entry creation is too high in these applications, thresholds are hit quite often, GC is triggered but not able to collect anything because things are still alive and there is no garbage. Counters are reset, but within few statements they again hit the thresholds. GC is triggered again but very less is collected and so on.

So as you see, GC is not able to collect significantly, however it is triggered at fixed intervals (as thresholds are fixed). Each GC cycle proves to be costlier than previous one as more objects have been created since last GC cycle happened.

So to fix this problem, we made the three thresholds adaptive. After each GC cycle, we check if GC was profitable or not, meaning significant collection happened or not. If it was not, then we double the thresholds. If it was, then the thresholds are not changed. Obviously there is an upper bound on value of thresholds, beyond which they are not doubled even if GC cycle was not profitable. Also if GC cycle collected everything, thresholds are set to their initial values.

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed reading it.

-JP