Object turnover.

Chris Muller afunkyobject at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 3 04:46:59 UTC 2004


> Should I worry about this object turnover, or is the system designed
> to handle this high object turnover?   Just trying to get my head
> around some of the issues of efficient squeak code..

Hi Ryan, in my experience, turnover is not something to "worry" about as much
as something to be "aware" of.

While it is amazing how fast the garbage-collector can turn over objects, I've
observed that reducing allocation *can* help when, for example, you have a
performance-sensitive portion of your program.  You may discover it is creating
many thousands of objects where it could simply reuse one would probably show
up in the profiler (i.e., TimeProfileBrowser).

The author of the read that Andreas kindly shared also acknowledges allocation
is not free; he was amazed when VW only took 1 second compared to 9 for C but
then explained why; the allocation didn't happen.

I do generally prefer to, "optimize later, as-needed."

Cheers,
  Chris



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list