Impacts of the squeak garbage collector

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Tue Feb 19 01:22:20 UTC 2002


>On Tuesday, February 19, 2002, at 12:37 AM, Scott A Crosby wrote:
>>>>We *know* that increasing these parameters makes macroBenchmarks go
>>>>faster.
>>>
>>>We *really* do?
>>
>>Yep.. Try increasing them, giving squeak a couple hundred megs of RAM, and
>>running macrobenchmarks.

Mmm this is all interesting and good. However based on past 
experiences with the VisualWorks GC I can say the first thing you 
need to do is understand the behavior of the current GC. IE how it 
runs and what it is doing. This can only be done by collecting hard 
statistics on what the GC is doing.

In the past I've discussed doing something about this. I guess if 
nothing else comes up I'll look into it. The first step is actually 
collect a lot more numbers at interesting places in the GC to 
understand what it is doing. Based on that, and also having code 
changes to the VM in place to affect changes we can better decide 
what is best.

For example a change I made a year ago just to understand some things 
was looking at how long each IGC took, then adjusting the object 
allocation count up/down based on that metric, versus an indicated 
target.


-- 
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
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