A garbage collection system that needs to meet real-time requirements breaks large objects that need to be moved into a series of arraylets. The arraylets are sized such that the amount of time required to move the arraylets is bounded by a predetermined amount. The arrays are preferably uniformly represented in the header for each array with a series of arraylet pointers that indicate the location of the arraylets. Control-flow graph splitting is used to eliminate multiple tests and allow common sub-expression elimination. Strip-mining can also be used to improve the efficiency of the process.