Impacts of the squeak garbage collector

John.Maloney at disney.com John.Maloney at disney.com
Mon Feb 18 22:36:09 UTC 2002


Hi, Scott,

At 3:17 PM -0500 2/18/02, Scott A Crosby wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 John.Maloney at disney.com wrote:
>> Different applications benefit from different settings, which is one
>> reason the parameters can be changed at run time. (The other reason is
>> to allow experiments such as the one Scott just performed. :-)) The
>> current defaults were set to allow smooth real-time multimedia on a
>> 100 MHz PowerPC or equivalent. Because Squeak was developed for a
>> community of teachers and children, we believed (and still do) that
>> the default settings should support multimedia even on older machines.
>
>Ah, that explains why they're so low. But, I suspect that a lot of the
>uses of squeak are not that hard realtime, or not on that sort of
>hardware. So, the GC parm are specifically designed for the hardest task
>on the slowest hardware, when both of them are relatively uncommon, both
>individually, and especially in combinations.

True, but teachers and kids are not likely to have the sophistication to
tweak GC settings, whereas the serious Smalltalkers on the Squeak list do.
So, if we did enough benchmarking to come up with settings for some of
the intersting positions on your "latency vs. GC overhead" knob and
perhaps make a little UI for selecting these settings, I think we could
address the needs of both communities.

Congratulations on getting into graduate school, by the way. Where did
you do your undergrad studies?

	-- John

P.S. I just noticed that my clock was set wrong this morning. Apologies...





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