When will .NET have a low-pause-time garbage collector
A low-pause-time garbage collector would greatly improve .NET's ability to serve as a platform for soft real-time systems. It doesn't have to be perfect. For example, I'd be happy with something where there was at most one pause per second, each pause was less than .2 seconds, and half the process's memory was inaccessible to the application due to garbage collection management
It may be that the combination of falling memory costs and advancing garbage collection technology have reached a point where it's reasonable to implement some form of low-pause garbage collection in .NET
One paper about low pause-time garbage collection ("A Real-time Garbage Collector with Low Overhead and Consistent Utilization ", by David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, V.T. Rajan) is available at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/bacon03realtime.html . For their Java-based implementation they discuss their collection benchmarks with pause times on the order of 10 milliseconds
