What is the Orinoco garbage collector in V8?
V8's modern GC that uses incremental and concurrent marking and sweeping to reduce pause times. Instead of a long stop-the-world pause, marking is done in small steps interleaved with JS execution, and sweeping happens on a background thread.
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More FAQs in Garbage Collection in JavaScript (V8) Explained
V8 uses generational mark-and-sweep (Orinoco). New objects are in the young generation (collected frequently via scavenge). Surviving objects are promoted to the old generation (collected less frequently via mark-sweep-compact). The GC is incremental and concurrent to minimize pauses.
Most objects die young (temp variables, intermediate results). So collecting the young generation frequently is cheap and effective. Old objects are collected less frequently because they tend to survive longer.
Closures (keep lexical environments alive), event listeners on detached DOM elements, uncleared timers, global variables, and unbounded caches. These keep objects reachable, so the GC cannot free them.
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