So, recent versions of OSProcess have this neat trick of being able to fork and save the image in a background process, which means you can have a large long-running image - say, a Seaside server - drop a backup of itself to disk without, hopefully, skipping a beat. In theory, because of the copy-on-write forking that modern unices use, it should even be able to do this without allocating much extra memory as long as it does it quickly enough. However, since every snapshot is preceded by a full GC, which moves tons of memory around, in practice what I see is that memory usage doubles whenever I do the background save.
How necessary is it to do the GC before a snapshot? Is it possible to do a writeImageFile() without a GC and safely use the resulting image, or does that violate some assumptions somewhere?
Avi