Limitations of Partial Compaction: Towards Practical Bounds

Compaction of a managed heap is a costly operation to be avoided as much as possible in commercial runtimes. Instead, partial compaction is often used to defragment parts of the heap and avoid space blowup. Previous study of compaction limitation provided some initial asymptotic bounds but no implications for practical systems. In this work, we extend the theory to obtain better bounds and make them strong enough to become meaningful for modern systems.