• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.8
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• pp.378-384
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• 2008

Many embedded systems are supporting Java as their software platform via Java virtual machine. Java virtual machine manages memory automatically by providing automatic memory management, i.e. garbage collector. Because only scarce memory is available to embedded system, Java virtual machine should use small memory and manage it efficiently. This paper introduces two memory management techniques to exploit small memory in Java virtual machine which can execute multiple Java applications concurrently. First, compaction based garbage collection is introduced to overcome external fragmentation problem in presence of immovable memory area. Then garbage collector driven class unloading is introduced to reduce memory use of unnecessary loaded classes. We implemented these techniques in working embedded system and observed that they are very efficient, since more Java applications are able to be executed concurrently and memory use is also reduced with these techniques.