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What does it mean when Mark-and-Sweep algorithm has a disadvantage of "stop the world"? What does the world refer to? and why does it stop the world?

JAngara
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  • Possible duplicate of [Is Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) a stop the world event?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21230165/is-concurrent-mark-sweep-cms-a-stop-the-world-event) – mazaneicha Oct 10 '16 at 16:46

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A simple google search about this agorithm brought this as first site (at least for me)

The main disadvantage of the mark-and-sweep approach is the fact that that normal program execution is suspended while the garbage collection algorithm runs. In particular, this can be a problem in a program that interacts with a human user or that must satisfy real-time execution constraints. For example, an interactive application that uses mark-and-sweep garbage collection becomes unresponsive periodically.

So basically your program will just freeze during memory deallocation.

meJustAndrew
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