International Business Machines Corporation
DEEP OBJECT GRAPH TRAVERSAL

Abstract:

A first thread of a garbage collector can determine fields, in class metadata assigned to objects contained in a local memory, that are self-referencing fields. For a plurality of the objects, recursively, the first thread can determine whether the object has at least one child object, indicated by a self-referencing field of the object, that has not been assigned to a destination cache or a previously generated source cache. If so, the first thread can assign the child object to the destination cache to indicate that the child object is live. The first thread can add the destination cache to a global scan queue as a source cache. A second thread of the garbage collector can initiate object scanning on objects indicated in the first source cache. Memory locations where live objects are not located can be reclaimed.