PROGRAM CONTROL APPARATUS AND METHOD, AND PROGRAM RECORDING MEDIUM

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To maintain high performance at all times by enabling a GC (Garbage Collection: program playing central role in memory management) thread to be processed substantially concurrently with another thread, and enabling an incremental GC that ensures completion of the GC in a short period of time even if the GC is suspended at a certain stage. SOLUTION: A program control apparatus is provided with a means for incrementally performing the garbage collection thread which detects an object that is not referred to by any object in a heap area of a memory and releases the memory area of the detected object as a memory allocatable free area of another object; a means for performing scheduling to execute in time division each thread according to its priority; and a means for alternately changing the priority of the garbage collection thread in both states where the priority is higher and lower than the priorities of other threads. COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI