Automatic Storage Management for Systems with Real Time Constraints

A 'garbage collector' programmed in C reclaims objects by executing during the allocation of new objects. After every N allocations (8=N=1024) an application is delayed while lost resources are recovered. The average delay is 6 ms on a Sun3 sup TM and 2 ms of a Sun4 sup TM with a bounded worse case delay of 10 ms on both. We conjecture that this is the tightest real-time bount of its kind.