Software and Programmer Efficiency Research Group

This is step 2 of 3 of the ParaBoost Challenge.

The Jikes RVM includes different garbage collectors, amongst them collectors called "GenImmix" (the default collector), "SemiSpace", and "MarkSweep".

In this step, you will evaluate the impact the choice of garbage collector has on performance. In particular, you will build two configurations of the virtual machine, one with the SemiSpace collector, and the other with the MarkSweep collector. The choice of garbage collector should be the only difference between those two configurations. Otherwise, the two configurations have to be identical to the production configuration (as defined in build/configs/production.properties). Read the documentation on configuring the Jikes RVM for how you can build such configurations.

Build the two configurations of the Jikes RVM. Then conduct an experiment where you run the two configurations to answer the following question: Which of the two garbage collectors has the better performance?

Note that there are many ways to perform this experiment. Describe how you did it, and explain why you did what you did. If you don't have time to perform as thorough an experiment as you'd like, briefly sketch how you would improve the experiment if you had more time. Try to be as concise as possible. Your description has to fit on one page in the ParaBoost Challenge document that you submit with your application.