GoingDeep: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC

Maoni Stephens is a software developer who spends her time implementing .NET's GC. In fact, she's been working on the GC since the early days of .NET. Andrew Pardoe is the GC PM. The last time we focused on GC on C9 was a conversation with GC creator Patrick Dussud. In that conversation he suggested that we talk to Maoni to get some more deep insights into how the CLR manages object lifetimes.

By now, most of us take garbage collection for granted (it's one of the great -and often misunderstood- implicit properties of managed code). Patrick also talked about asynchronous GC collections and the work needed to be done to limit the performance issues when the GC collects garbage (objects no longer in scope) and enable the GC to scale to many-core clients.

Well, Maoni has been very busy for the past few years and with CLR 4, the GC team have come up with a new concurrent collection strategy called Background GC.

From Maoni's blog:

Background GC is an evolution to concurrent GC. The significance of background GC is we can do ephemeral GCs while a background GC is in progress if needed. As with concurrent GC, background GC is also only applicable to full GCs and ephemeral GCs are always done as blocking GCs, and a background GC is also done on its dediated GC thread. The ephemeral GCs done while a background GC is in progress are called foreground GCs

Tune in and meet the main developer of .NET's garbage collector and a recent addition to the team who comes from the native world and will drive GC into the future.

Enjoy!