A new and five older Concurrent Memory Reclamation Schemes in Comparison (Stamp-it)

Abstract: Memory management is a critical component in almost all shared-memory, concurrent data structures and algorithms, consisting in the efficient allocation and the subsequent reclamation of shared memory resources. This paper contributes a new, lock-free, amortized constant-time memory reclamation scheme called \emph{Stamp-it}, and compares it to five well-known, selectively efficient schemes from the literature, namely Lock-free Reference Counting, Hazard Pointers, Quiescent State-based Reclamation, Epoch-based Reclamation, and New Epoch-based Reclamation. An extensive, experimental evaluation with both new and commonly used benchmarks is provided, on four different shared-memory systems with hardware supported thread counts ranging from 48 to 512, showing Stamp-it to be competitive with and in many cases and aspects outperforming other schemes.