String deduplication during garbage collection in virtual machines

Memory management is a significant topic in virtual machine research. As allocation and deallocation of objects is performed automatically, garbage collection (GC) has become an important field of research. It aims to speed up and optimize the execution of applications developed in languages such as Java, C#, Python and others. Even though GC techniques have become more sophisticated, automatic memory management is not optimal. Garbage collection techniques, such as reference counting, mark-sweep, mark-compact, copying collection and generational garbage collection build the base of most automated memory management environments. Most GC policies include a stop-the-world phase that is used to detect live objects.The research presented in this paper aims to improve the automatic memory management and application execution by investigating an optimization of the memory layout. The goal of the approach described is to utilize the stop-the-world phase of the garbage collector in order to detect duplicate strings and to deduplicate them before copying them to a different region. The goal of this algorithm is to reduce memory duplication, as well as copying of memory, in order to decrease the heap size and therefore the number of garbage collections required to execute the client application.