Smarter Atomic Smart Pointers: Safe and Efficient Concurrent Memory Management (Abstract)

Abstract

We present a technique for concurrent memory management that combines the ease-of-use of automatic memory reclamation, and the efficiency of state-of-the-art deferred reclamation algorithms. First, we combine ideas from referencing counting and hazard pointers in a novel way to implement automatic concurrent reference counting with wait-free, constant-time overhead. Second, we generalize our previous algorithm to obtain a method for converting any standard manual SMR technique into an automatic reference counting technique with a similar performance profile. We have implemented the approach as a C++ library and compared it experimentally to existing atomic reference-counting libraries and state-of-the-art manual techniques. Our results indicate that our technique is faster than existing reference-counting implementations, and competitive with manual memory reclamation techniques. More importantly, it is significantly safer than manual techniques since objects are reclaimed automatically.