Is a garbage collector (.net/java) an issue for real-time systems?

Question

When building a system which needs to respond very consistently and fast, is having a garbage collector a potential problem?

I remember horror stories from years ago whe

Answer 1

Our company is employing a large .Net-based software application that amongst other things monitors binary sensors over fieldbus networks. In some situations, the sensors activate only for a short amount of time (300 ms) but our software still needs to capture those events as the controlled system will immediately fail when an event is missed. We recently observed increased problems at our customer sites due to the garbage collector running for long timespans (up to 1 second). We are still trying to figure out how to enforce a time limit on the garbage collector. In conclusion of this short story, i would say the garbage collector is a handicap in time critical applications.