Patent ID: 8423589

Claim:
A computer program product to perform garbage collection on an object heap, the computer program product comprising a computer-usable storage medium having computer-usable program code embodied therein, the computer-usable program code comprising: computer-usable program code to perform a copy phase on an object heap by copying live objects from a source space to a destination space; computer-usable program code to maintain, during the copy phase, marked bit information in at least one of a mark map cache and a mark map structure for objects copied from the source space to the destination space; computer-usable program code to generate an abort condition when copying an object from the source space to the destination space fails due to insufficient space in the destination space to store the object; computer-usable program code to terminate, in response to the abort condition, tracing work and reference updating performed in association with the copy phase, wherein the tracing work is performed to find live objects in the source space and the reference updating is performed to update references to live objects that are moved from one location to another; computer-usable program code to initiate, in response to the abort condition, a mark phase that marks live objects in the source space; computer-usable program code to resume, by the mark phase, the tracing work and reference updating terminated by the copy phase; and computer-usable program code to initiate, after the mark phase, a sweep phase that frees memory in the source space not occupied by live objects.