Garbage Collection – Pt 3: Generations

December 29, 2010 by

The .NET Garbage Collector is a generational collector, meaning it collects objects in different generations. The main purpose of generations is performance. Simply put, having the GC perform a full garbage collection on every object reference tree on every collection is way too expensive.

The idea behind generational collections is that having a segmented collection, the GC will visit more often those objects with a short lifespan, than those with a long lifespan. Given the fact that most objects are short-lived, such as local variables and parameters (they’ll go out of scope relatively faster), we can collect memory a lot faster and more efficiently if we keep collecting these kind of objects with a shorter frequency than objects with a long lifespan.

So how does the GC determine the lifespan of an object? Does it even do that? How does GC manage its generations? What exactly is a generation?

GC Roots and Generations

Generations are logical views of the Garbage Collector Heap (read Part2). The GC has 3 generations: gen-0, gen-1 and gen-2. Gen-0 and gen-1 are known as ephemeral generations because they store small objects that have a short lifespan. GC generations also have precedence, so gen-0 is said to be a younger generation than gen-1, and gen-1 is a younger generation than gen-2. When objects in a generation are collected, all younger generations are also collected:

  • Collect (gen-0) = Collect (gen-0)
  • Collect (gen-1) = Collect (gen-0) + Collect (gen-1)
  • Collect (gen-2) = Collect (gen-1) + Collect (gen-2)

Gen-0 and gen-1 collections are very fast since the heap segment is relatively small while gen-2 collections can be relatively slow. Gen-2 collection is also referred to as Full Garbage Collection because the whole heap is collected. When it’s time for gen-2 collection, the GC stops the program execution and finds all the roots into the GC heap. Departing from each root the GC will visit every single object and also track down every pointer and references to other objects contained in every one of the visited objects and marking all them as it moves through the heap. At the end of the process, the GC has found all reachable objects in the system, so everything else can be collected because it is unreachable. The golden rules GC collections never break are:

  1. GC collects all objects that are not roots.
  2. GC collects all objects that are not reachable from GC roots.

In Garbage Collection Part 2, I briefly talked about GC roots but not with much depth. There are many different categories or types of GC roots, but the more common and significant ones are static variables, global variables and objects living in the Stack that are pointing to the Heap. Here is kind of a messy idea of how things look when it comes to GC roots:

Now, in reality the heap doesn’t look that bad nor it’s organized in such a hectic manner. The [Read more...]

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Garbage Collection – Pt 2: .NET Object Life-cycle

December 28, 2010 by

This article is a continuation of Garbage Collection – Pt 1: Introduction.

Like everything else in this world, objects in object-oriented programming have a lifetime from when they are born (created) to when they die (destroyed or destructed). In the .Net Framework objects  have the following life cycle:

  1. Object creation (new keyword, dynamic instantiation or activation, etc).
  2. The first time around, all static object initializers are called.
  3. The runtime allocates memory for the object in the managed heap.
  4. The object is used by the application. Members (Properties/Methods/Fields) of the object type are called and used to change the object.
  5. If the developer decided to add disposing conditions, then the object is disposed. This happens by coding a using statement or manually calling to the object’s Dispose method for IDisposable objects.
  6. If the object has a finalizer, the GC puts the object in the finalization queue.
  7. If the object was put in the finalization queue, the GC will, at an arbitraty moment in time, call the object’s finalizer.
  8. Object is destroyed by marking its memory section in the heap segment as a Free Object.

The CLR Garbage Collector intervenes in the most critical steps in the object lifecycle; GC is almost completely managing steps 3, 6, 7 and 8 in the life of an object. This is one of the main reasons I believe the GC is one of the most critical parts of the .NET Framework that is often overlooked and not fully understood.

These are the key concepts and agents that participate in the life of a .NET object that should be entirely comprehended:

The Managed Heap and the Stack

The .Net Framework has a managed heap (aka GC Heap), which is nothing more than an advance data structure that the GC uses when allocating reference type objects (mostly). Each process has one heap that is shared between all .NET application domains running within the process.

Similarly, the thread Stack is another advance data structure that tracks the code execution of a thread. There is on stack per thread per process.

They are often compared to a messy pile of laundry (GC heap) and an organized shoe rack (Stack). Ultimately they are both used to store objects with some distinctions. There are 4 things that we store on the Stack and Heap as the code executes:

  1. Value Types: Go on heap or stack, depending on where they were declared.
    • If a Value Type is declared outside of a method, but inside a Reference Type it will be placed within the Reference Type on the Heap.
    • If a Value Type is boxed it’ll be placed in the Heap.
    • If the Value Type is within an iterator block, it’ll be placed in the Heap.
    • Else goes in the Stack.
  2. Reference Types: Always go on the Heap.
  3. Pointers: Go on heap or stack, depending on where they were declared.
  4. Instructions: Always go on the Stack.

Facts about the Heap

  1. The managed heap is a fast data structure that allows for fast access to any object in the heap regardless of when was inserted or where it was inserted within the heap.
  2. The managed heap is divided into heap segments. Heap segments are physical chunks of memory the GC reserves from the OS on behalf of CLR managed code.
  3. The 2 main segments of the heap are:
    1. The Small Objects Heap (SOH) segment: where small objects (less than 85 Kb) are stored. The SOH is also known as the ephemeral segment.
    2. The Large Objects Heap (LOH) segment: where large objects (more than 85 Kb) are stored.
  4. All reference types are stored on the heap.

Facts about the Stack

  1. The Stack is a block of pre-allocated memory (usually 1MB) that never changes in size.
  2. The Stack is an organized storage structure where grabbing the top item is O(1).
  3. Objects stored in the Stack are considered ROOTS of the GC.
  4. Objects stored in the Stack have a lifetime determined by their scope.
  5. Objects stored in the Stack are NEVER collected by the GC. The storage memory used by [Read more...]
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Garbage Collection – Pt 1: Introduction

December 27, 2010 by

Garbage collection is a practice in software engineering and computer science that aims at the automation of memory management in a software program. Its origins date all the way back to 1958 and the Lisp programming language implementation (“Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine” by John McCarthy), the first to carry such mechanism.

The basic problem it tries to solve is that of re-claiming unused memory in a computer running a program. Software programs rely on memory as the main storage agent for variables, network connections and all other data needed by the program to run; this memory needs to be claimed by the software application in order to be used. But memory in a computer is not infinite, thus we need a way to mark the pieces of memory we are not using anymore as “free” again, so other programs can use them after me. There are 2 main ways to do this, a manual resource cleanup, or an automatic resource cleanup. They both have advantages and disadvantages, but this article will focus on the later since it’s the one represented by the Garbage Collectors.

There are plenty of great articles and papers about garbage collection theory. Starting in this article and with other entries following up, I’ll talk about the garbage collection concepts applied to the .NET Garbage Collector specifically and will cover the following areas:

  1. What is the .NET Garbage Collector? (below in this page)
  2. Object’s lifecycle and the GC. Finalizers and diposable objects  (read Part 2)
  3. Generational Collection (read Part 3)
  4. Garbage collection performance implications (article coming soon)
  5. Best practices (article coming soon)

What is the .NET Garbage Collector?

The .NET Framework Garbage Collector (GC from now on) is one of the least understood areas of the framework, while being one of the most extremely sensitive and important parts of it. In a nutshell, the GC is an automatic memory management service that takes care of the resource cleanup for all managed objects in the managed heap.

It takes away from the developer the micro-management of resources required in C++, where you needed to manually delete your variables to free up memory. It is important to note that GC is NOT a language feature, but a framework feature. The Garbage Collector is the VIP superstar in the .NET CLR, with influence to all .NET languages.

I’m convinced those of you that worked before with C or C++ cannot count how many times you forgot to free memory when it is no longer needed or tried to use memory after you’ve [Read more...]

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