On Tuesday, February 19, 2002, at 12:37 AM, Scott A Crosby wrote:
We *know* that increasing these parameters makes macroBenchmarks go faster.
We *really* do?
Yep.. Try increasing them, giving squeak a couple hundred megs of RAM, and running macrobenchmarks.
Mmm this is all interesting and good. However based on past experiences with the VisualWorks GC I can say the first thing you need to do is understand the behavior of the current GC. IE how it runs and what it is doing. This can only be done by collecting hard statistics on what the GC is doing.
In the past I've discussed doing something about this. I guess if nothing else comes up I'll look into it. The first step is actually collect a lot more numbers at interesting places in the GC to understand what it is doing. Based on that, and also having code changes to the VM in place to affect changes we can better decide what is best.
For example a change I made a year ago just to understand some things was looking at how long each IGC took, then adjusting the object allocation count up/down based on that metric, versus an indicated target.