Selective sweeping
Yoo Chung, Soo‐Mook Moon, Kemal Ebcio lu, Dan Sahlin · Software Practice and Experience · 2004
Traditional mark and sweep garbage collectors use time proportional to the heap size when sweeping memory, since all objects in the heap, dead or alive, must be traversed. Here we introduce a sweeping algorithm which traverses only the live objects. Since this sweeping algorithm is slower when the heap occupancy is high, we also discuss how to avoid this slowdown by using an adaptive algorithm. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.