{"id":1025283,"date":"2024-04-15T02:42:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T09:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1025283"},"modified":"2024-04-15T02:46:37","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T09:46:37","slug":"concurrent-immediate-reference-counting","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/concurrent-immediate-reference-counting\/","title":{"rendered":"Concurrent Immediate Reference Counting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Memory management for optimistic concurrency in unmanaged programming languages is challenging. Safe
\nmemory reclamation (SMR) algorithms help address this, but they are difficult to use correctly. Automatic
\nreference counting provides a simpler interface, but it has been less efficient than SMR algorithms. Recently,
\nthere has been a push to apply the optimizations used in garbage collectors for managed languages to elide
\nreference count updates from local references. Notably, Fast Reference Counter, OrcGC, and Concurrent
\nDeferred Reference Counting use SMR algorithms to protect local references by deferring decrements or
\nreclamation. While they show a significant performance improvement, their use of deferral may result
\nin growing memory usage due to slow reclamation of linked structures, and suboptimal performance in
\nupdate-heavy workloads.<\/p>\n

We present Concurrent Immediate Reference Counting<\/em> (CIRC), a new combination of SMR algorithms with
\nreference counting. CIRC employs deferral like other modern methods, but it avoids their problems with
\nnovel algorithms for (1) immediately reclaiming linked structures recursively by tracking the reachability of
\neach object, and (2) applying decrements immediately and deferring only the reclamation. Our experiments
\nshow that CIRC\u2019s memory usage does not grow over time and is only slightly higher than the underlying
\nSMR. Moreover, CIRC further narrows the performance gap between the underlying SMR, positioning it
\nas a promising solution to safe automatic memory management for highly concurrent data structures in
\nunmanaged languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Memory management for optimistic concurrency in unmanaged programming languages is challenging. Safe memory reclamation (SMR) algorithms help address this, but they are difficult to use correctly. Automatic reference counting provides a simpler interface, but it has been less efficient than SMR algorithms. Recently, there has been a push to apply the optimizations used in garbage 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Jung","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Jeonghyeon Kim","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Matthew Parkinson","user_id":32838,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Matthew Parkinson"},{"type":"text","value":"Jeehoon 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