The LispWorks garbage collector works in unison with the storage allocator to arrange allocated objects in a series of "generations". Each generation contains objects of a particular age. In practice most Lisp data objects are only required for a very short period of time. That is, they are ephemeral. The LispWorks garbage collector concentrates its efforts on repeatedly scanning the most recent generation. Such a scan requires only a fraction of a second and reclaims most of the space allocated since the last collection. Any object in the most recent generation that survives a number of such collections is promoted to the next youngest generation. Eventually this older generation becomes full, and only then is it collected.
In memory, a generation consists of a chain of segments. Each segment is a contiguous block of memory, beginning with a header and followed by the allocation area. The generations are numbered from 0 upwards, so that generation 0 is the youngest.
The first generation normally consists of two segments: the first segment is relatively small, and is where most of the allocation takes place. The second segment is called the big-chunk area, and is used for allocating large objects and when overflow occurs (see below for a discussion of overflow).
The second generation (generation 1) is an intermediate generation, for objects that have been promoted from generation 0 (typically for objects that live for some minutes).
Long-lived objects are eventually promoted to generation 2. Note that generation 2 is not scanned automatically. Therefore these objects will not be reclaimed (even if they are not referenced) until an explicit call to a garbage collector function (for example
mark-and-sweep
on generation 2, or
clean-down
) or when the image is saved. Normally, objects are not promoted from generation 2 to generation 3, except when the image is saved.
Generation 3 normally contains only objects that existed at startup time, that is those were saved in the image. Normally it is not scanned at all, except when an image is saved.
Note that the division between the generations is a result of the promotion mechanism, and is not a property of a piece of code itself. A piece of system software code that is loaded in the system (for example, a patch) is treated the same as any other code. The garbage collection code is explicitly loaded in the static area using the function
switch-static-allocation
.