I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the physical size of the objects which weren't retrieved. As you said, encoding it in the referencing oid might be the only way - which would require rewriting of the OidMap and upgrade of legacy repositories. :(
I understand why it won't work with becomeForward: - because that would be creating two copies of the object. But Magma needs to becomeForward:, rather than become:, its proxies... (pause to remember for sure why...). I think because of proxies to Symbol selectors - you can't become: any object to a Symbol selector or else their CompiledMethod literals would refer to the Proxy... So that would be another hurdle to overcome to succeed with your idea.
Just so you know, I _did_ implement your other workaround idea - where reified proxies are "saved up" into a OrderedCollection which is then bulk-becomed only once every 30 seconds. I didn't know if you saw it in the last release (Magma 1.2) - it was a great performance improvement! Your creative ideas are really helping Magma.
Thanks, Chris
On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 8:12 PM, Igor Stasenko siguctua@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting observation:
if two oops which we need to swap: oop1 and oop2 taking exactly same space in memory, then all we need to do is to swap their memory contents, instead of scanning heap and updating pointers!
This makes a become operation extremely cheap for such pairs! As for objects of different sizes, we could still use slow algorithm.
But knowing that if two objects with same size will be swapped much faster, a developers could adapt their algorithms to exploit this feature (use fixed-size objects instead of variable-sized ones etc).
Magma using proxies, which then #becomeForward: to real objects when reified. This is very costly operation and main reason why it so slow on loading objects from server. To speed thing up, a special trick can be used: - each time server sends an object ID (instead of real object) it could also send its size in bytes (or even more clever - you can encode object size in its ID ;) ). Then a client will create a proxy for given object and will try to match the size, if its possible. (nobody said that proxy can't be variable-sized, right?)
Then once client requesting to reify given proxy with real object from database, VM will just overwrite a proxy's memory contents with real object.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.