What's the dissertation about? Well, this is the abstract:
Many myths and paradoxes surround garbage collection. The first myth is that garbage collection is
only suitable for the incompetent, unskilled, or lazy. In fact garbage collection offers many architec-
tural and software engineering advantages, even to the skilled developer. The second myth is that
garbage collection is all about about collecting garbage. Garbage collectors also include an allocation
component, which, along with their powers of object rearrangement, can make a significant difference
to application performance. Thirdly, criticisms of garbage collection often focus on the pause times,
and responses to these criticisms often focus exclusively on reducing pause times, in the mistaken belief
that small pause times guarantee good application response times. Pause times are also often used as
a metric of general application performance, and an increase in pause times is taken as an indicator
of worsened performance, when in fact the opposite the opposite is often true. Paradoxically, even
the total amount of time spent paused for garbage collection is not a good predictor of the impact of
garbage collection on application performance. Finally, the sixth myth is that garbage collection has
a disastrous performance impact. While garbage collection can hurt application performance, it can
also help application performance to the point where it exceeds the performance with manual memory
management."
Although some of the arguments it makes are no longer necessary, there's a lot I still like about the paper. It's got equations, it's got queueing theory, it's got dissections of usenet trolling about GC, it's got diagrams, and - the best bit - photos of garbage bins. You can read the full 84 pages here; it's licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike.
