> There is no "simple" way for a particular meaning of "simple" - the
> current mechanism (which I wrote years and years back) was by far the
> simplest thing that could possibly work and it has served its intended
> purposes (mainly avoiding dangling resource handles like files or
> sockets) very well. It was never intended to scale up to thousands of
> objects. Any other mechanism will necessarily be more complex than the
> current mechanism.

This is a pity, since Seaside uses WeakArrays to cache session state.
We had some applications that started to spend a lot (all) of the CPU
time within the weak-finalizer process. The workaround was to disable
the use of WeakArrays, with the drawback that memory was released much
later and the application required much more memory.

For frameworks like Seaside it is essential to have a performant
implementation of WeakArrays up to an unlimited size. Also
Dictionaries should have a much better performance, i.e. access-time
should be O(1) as its name suggests and not O(n) for more than a few
thousand elements.

My question: How can we improve the current implementation, that
worked well for years, but that obviously doesn't scale well enough
anymore? It should be certainly a goal for Squeak 4 to have performant
WeakArrays and Dictionaries of arbitrary size.

Lukas

--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch