From: Archie Cobbs (archie@whistle.com)
Date: Sun Nov 01 1998 - 12:05:30 EST
Godmar & Alexandre-
Thanks very much for the comments on reference counting.. that's
exactly what I was looking for. E.g., the problems with synchronization
and locality didn't occur to me. I can see how they would slow
things up a great deal...
So, on to the next idea :-) that is, getting the incremental
GC working. What's left to be done? Is it more missing implementation
or debugging what's there? Any subtle points I should be aware
of looking through the code?
Just as a data point, here's my motivation for asking about this
stuff... one of my applications is a server that accepts transaction
connections from clients. So it spends a lot of time just sitting
there doing nothing. The non-optimal behavior is..
- The GC usually gets triggered during a client transaction
(because that's when new memory is needed), so clients often
experience a noticable pause.
- While no clients are connected, all the unreachable objects
are still held by the server indefinitely, which means it's
holding a lot of memory that the rest of the system could be
using.
- It's a shame that while the server is just sitting there it
can't be cleaning up memory ahead of time.
I'm sure this is a typical scenario.
Thanks,
-Archie
___________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs * Whistle Communications, Inc. * http://www.whistle.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 23 2000 - 19:57:02 EDT