A new squeak ObjectMemory?

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Sat Feb 2 07:13:26 UTC 2002


>If the tentative profile results I'm seeing are accurate... It looks like
>the next big bottleneck in squeak may be the GC and the squeak object
>engine. If someone starts working on them, who knows what the next
>ObjectMemory may look and behave like. Thus, spending time on
>microptimizing the current GC *may* not be useful.
>
>(If anyone wants to brainstorm ideas, continue on this thread.)
>
>
>Scott

Well there are two problems.

a) Squeak only works within the 0-2GB address range. This should be fixed so
that Squeak can live with 0-4GB.

b) I've seen notes that imply darwin (os-x) will only allocate 1.7GB 
contiguous (that might get fixed) But you need to fix (a) first 
anyways.


c) Ha, I must say I go away for a few hours to see a movie with the 
kids, and lo about 20 notes are generated on "Dynamic system memory 
use" so let me say

a) I'm only looking for an optimal solution under os-x, other OS VM 
subsystems are considerations of others. I'm surprised no-one 
mentioned OS/2, once I allocated 512MB to VisualAge on a 24MB box, we 
survived.

b) While my back was turned people are installing 1 or 2 GB in their 
laptops/desktops

c) I'm sure if I have 50GB of disk space I could give 10GB to the 
swapper, or even that 30GB I'm not using quite yet.

Given (b) and (c) there is expectations from the herd that blindly 
manipulating GB objects is well just something that should happen and 
of course since Squeak can only deal with < 2GB they've already 
outrun our ability to keep them happy.
-- 
--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
===========================================================================



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list