On Sep 28, 2007, at 11:02 , Giovanni Corriga wrote:

> Il giorno ven, 28/09/2007 alle 10.00 +0200, Bert Freudenberg ha  
> scritto:
>
>> Another idea I have been pondering for a while is making the lower
>> part of Squeak's object memory be "constant". There is a large number
>> of objects in an image that virtually never change but are only read.
>> This part does not have to be garbage-collected, making a full GC
>> much cheaper. When we fork off a new system process with the VM using
>> copy-on-write pages, this part could be shared between images,
>> reducing the over-all memory consumption significantly.
>
> Could this constant part be kept in a separate file, thus reducing  
> also
> the disk occupation of our images?

Haven't thought about that and I have a gut feeling this would be  
impractical, but who knows ... get the brains rolling ;)

"Perm space" in VisualWorks is similar, but I don't know anything  
about its implementation.

- Bert -