On Oct 7, 2005, at 1:24 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:

>
> On 7-Oct-05, at 12:59 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:
>
>
>> Mmmm, I have thought about doing a full GC without compacting,  
>> that would save time. Anyone consider if that would work?
>>
> Well, to do a full gc we have to scan the entire object memory,  
> mark&sweep style, and compacting after that is what gets the dead  
> memory out of the way. Leaving free chunks lying around might not  
> actually kill you but it seems a bit pointless. You're going to  
> have to do it at some point anyway.

Well, for my very specific goal of writing an image in the background  
it would be very useful... I'm happy to do the compacting at some  
point anyway, as long as it's not during the few seconds that the OS  
is trying its best to run two processes concurrently using the same  
memory pages.

Avi