Patent ID: 6865657

Claim:
A method for garbage collecting a virtual heap for a process executing within a virtual machine executing within a device, the method comprising: providing a store heap for the process, wherein the store heap is comprised in the virtual heap; providing an in-memory heap for the process, wherein the in-memory heap comprises a cached portion of the store heap for the process, and wherein the in-memory heap is comprised in the virtual heap; and a garbage collector process performing a generation of generational garbage collection on the virtual heap for the process executing within the virtual machine, wherein said performing the generation of garbage collection comprises: flushing one or more sections of a first plurality of sections in the in-memory heap to a subset of a second plurality of sections in the store heap, wherein said flushing is performed when objects in the one or more sections have been modified since a previous garbage collection; and performing garbage collection on the subset of the second plurality of sections in the store heap, wherein said garbage collection comprises: removing objects not referenced by the process from the subset of the second plurality of sections.