An approach to benchmarking storage reclamation strategies

A research program to gain experimental data to test the various conjectures and theories concerning the performance of storage reclamation strategies in a virtual memory environment is reported. A modular Lisp interpreter was designed in which various list storage and reclamation strategies could be implemented and evaluated. This Lisp interpreter is implemented in Turbo Pascal and runs under Microsoft DOS. It includes a virtual memory system. The Lisp interpreter is described along with the test programs and measurement strategies used for evaluating storage reclamation (termed garbage collection) performance in a virtual memory environment. Preliminary results are presented. >