some not-so-random questions

Michael S. Klein mklein at alumni.caltech.edu
Tue Nov 3 20:03:41 UTC 1998


> The real problem with both expansion and shrinking is the policy decision of
> when to do it. VW has quite a complicated policy implemented in the image, with
> hooks to change it almost any way you want. IIRC almost no customer ever
> changed anything, they just complained that the default wasn't good enough for
> them!

VW (base code) never shrinks ObjectMemory... It just provides a facility
for you to do it.  And I have often used it.  Sometimes I would need to
do a task that used mucho memory... didn't want to have to image save and 
restart just to release it back to the OS.  Very handy.

The main problem I had with the default MemoryPolicy was the default
memoryUpperBound was set to 16M.  Pretty low for todays machines.
This caused a premature preference for reclaimation over growth...
and the easiest way to speed up your app (for large apps).

Perhaps the value should have been based on (Date today) and Moore's law ;-)

-- Mike





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