A comparison of priority-based and incremental real-time garbage collectors in the implementation of the shadow design pattern

Abstract

This is our third report on real-time Java. Our previous work to develop and evaluate the Shadow Design Pattern was couched in the context of real-time garbage collection with assignable priorities as implemented for example in the Sun Java Real-Time System. In this report, we present our investigation of the pattern from the perspective of non-assignable priorities. Our experiment consisted of running the real-time application we used in our previous study on IBM WebSphere Real Time. IBM WebSphere Real Time automatically sets Metronome, its incremental real-time garbage collector, to a priority higher than the highest priority of the real-time threads that use the heap. The results from the experiment show that the modified code for the Shadow Design Pattern runs well under Metronome.