Real realtime performance of heap management systems, using incremental copying collectors

Realtime behaviour is normally associated with maximal response time in worst case situations. The author introduces a somewhat different notion of realtime behaviour, called realtime performance, which is based on an upperbound of the amount of time needed to acomplish a certain task. This concept is used to analyze the performance of incremental copying garbage collectors used in systems with automatic heap management. Traditionally those systems were considered unsuitable for realtime applications, either because of the inherent overhead of automatic collection, or because of the difficulty of implementing realtime collection on stock hardware. Recently however, an efficient implementation of incremental copying garbage collection was made, using stock hardware only. The combination of this method with the use of several object generations opens the world for realtime systems to use automatic collection