CC to vm-dev list, follow up on technical issues should go to vm-dev.
Chris, Igor, this sounds very encouraging. Yes, I'll help on the VM side, with guidance from Andreas and others (I am not technically competent on this issue). I'll probably be off list for a few days, but will catch up on this next week.
Andreas, Eliot, others - any advice or guidance?
Dave
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 10:14:00AM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
I have packaged up Igor's change-sets for the finalization fix:
http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7525 http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7473
into their respective MC packages and uploaded them to the Inbox.
Recall the original discussion:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-March/003958.html
I have been running with Igor's enhanced VM and image-side finalization patches for a few weeks now. The results are striking. Squeak applications using large Weak-collections deteriorate to a point of unusability without this fix because Squeak spends 95% of its time in the finalization process, leaving no time for application processing. With this fix installed, CPU utilization is 0% when the application is idle, providing excellent responsiveness.
This is a big, big, win for any application that uses Weak collections, and a win for Squeak overall because it's own use of weak-collections is enhanced.
While it seems to be backward compatible, e.g. I am able to run the enhanced VM on older images (including 3.9), and I am able to run with these image changes on an older VM, both are required to take advantage of the enhanced finalization.
I would like to push this into the trunk, but will need help from the VMMaker developers for that piece. David?
For Magma, this wil be the most exciting and important fix since #becomeForward:copyHash: introduced back in 2004.
- Chris