Balancing work on GC threads (.NET)

shikhakaul

In Server GC, each GC thread will work on its heap in parallel (that’s a simplistic view and is not necessarily true for all phases but on the high level it’s exact the idea of a parallel GC). So that alone means work is already split between GC threads. But because GC work for some stages can only proceed after all threads are done with their last stage (for example, we can’t have any GC thread start with the plan phase until all GC threads are done with the mark phase so we don’t miss objects that should be marked), we want the amount of GC work balanced on each thread as much as possible so the total pause can be shorter, otherwise if one thread is taking a long time to finish such a stage the other threads will be waiting around not doing anything. There are various things we do in order to make the work more balanced. We will continue to do work like this to balance out more.

shikhakaul

Follow