On Oct 2, 2007, at 3:53 , Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:

>   Giovanni,
>
>>> Another idea I have been pondering for a while is making the lower
>>> part of Squeak's object memory be "constant". There is a large  
>>> number
>>> of objects in an image that virtually never change but are only  
>>> read.
>>> This part does not have to be garbage-collected, making a full GC
>>> much cheaper. When we fork off a new system process with the VM  
>>> using
>>> copy-on-write pages, this part could be shared between images,
>>> reducing the over-all memory consumption significantly.
>>
>> Could this constant part be kept in a separate file, thus reducing  
>> also
>> the disk occupation of our images?
>
>   That may be tricky as others say, but by normalizing the start image
> offset to zero upon saving, the resulting .image *would* be more
> compressable by the LZ family of algorithm.  Whether it is true or not
> is a question...

Why would it be more compressable? Because there are more zeros in oops?

- Bert -