A very happy 2003 to you and all, PhiHo!

Let's Squeak through another one!

Gary

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: PhiHo Hoang
  To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
  Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 12:13 AM
  Subject: It's now 2003 (was Re: [ENH][VM][FIX] faster garbage collection,
and removal of unused vars)


  HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVREYONE.

  Cheers,

  PhiHo.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "John M McIntosh" <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
  To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
  Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 3:27 AM
  Subject: [ENH][VM][FIX] faster garbage collection, and removal of unused
  vars


  > This change set provides a 18 - 28% improvement in the GC logic using
  > an test image that has 1.1 million objects in it on the PowerPC.
  > I won't comment on if this makes any difference on intel, however
  > someone might try it and see what happens.
  >
  > In early December I took a look at the garbage collector and realized
  > for the mark logic, at least on the PowerPC, we were moving three key
  > variables  in and out of memory multiple times per object, versus
  > keeping everything in a register or two. Also we managed to make some
  > procedure calls for each object we looked at, which is time consuming.
  >
  > In discussing a possible fix with Tim, we realized that in some cases
  > because of inlining, why some global variables actually become local
  > variables because different SLANG methods are folded together.
  >
  > This change set add logic to review variable usage and if possible fold
  > variables that only appear in one inlined method into a declaration
  > within the one method and dropped them from the globals. Right now I
  > only deal with interp.c, and I've not really studied say variables
  > across N methods where N is > 2 but say < 6 to understand what could be
  > done with a bit more tweaking.
  >
  > Interesting enough these variables are:
  > field, parentField, child in the Mark Logic
  > cntx, val in the interpret routine.
  >
  > A bit of slang changing was also done to:
  >
  > 1) Provide an array headerTypeBytes, a lookup array for the header byte
  > length calculation versus doing a couple of IF statements.
  > 2) A few restructuring hints to ensure procedure calls actually become
  > inlined, where in the past they violated an inlining rule.
  > 3) Some really large routines in the compacting logic were broken into
  > multiple routines, because the logic is really in multiple steps and
  > this helps the compiler (ah stupid compilers) deal with register
  > allocation better. Also it helps one think about why we have multiple
  > steps.
  >
  > I think a bit more work could be done in this area, but I'll look for
  > feedback first.
  >
  > Also I've moved the logic from voidIsNotInt that dealt with ensuring
  > bogus unused variables are deleted into this change set.
  >
  > Now for the Globals as a structure logic, I've attached an addendum
  > change set (GCMakeItFasterGStruct-JMM.6.cs.gz) to provide the following
  > feature: Declare foo as a pointer to the foo structure as a local, this
  > makes for better powerpc code which improves overall performance by a
  > few percentage points. You also need this changeset because of some
  > structure changes if you've filed in the globals as a structure changes
  > sets, and want the faster GC speed.
  >
  > --
  > ========================================================================
  > ===
  > John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
  > Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
  > ========================================================================
  > ===
  >

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