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 -