Programmatically save image, and also do it periodically

Janko Mivšek janko.mivsek at eranova.si
Tue Jan 8 20:32:58 UTC 2008


Hi John,

John M McIntosh wrote:

> In the mailing list archives there was a long discussion of coding up a 
> special unix VM that uses unix's virtual memory features to
> fork the squeak process and do copy on write. This let the fork/snapshot 
> logic then save the image to disk, and let the copy of the process continue
> running at the expense of abusing the virtual memory features of Unix.

That sounds very interesting! An instant snapshot, that's what I am 
waiting for web application servers which use image as a database. Do 
you know if someone did some more steps to such snapshot?

> This ensured you got a correct copy of your image written to disk, and 
> that the write process did not hang up the image.  If you dig a bit more 
> you'll
> see you can call the save logic without the prompt, but what happens is 
> a full GC happens, then the machine is written out to disk. This process 
> takes many
> milliseconds/seconds and can be a long time if the image is really 
> large. Then if the image is busy you'll run into things like dropping 
> socket open requests because
> the VM does not respond to them promptly.
> 
> On Jan 8, 2008, at 10:18 AM, itsme213 wrote:
> 
>> I need to urgently do both these saves:
>>  - do these on command (via Seaside app interface)
>>  - automatically on a timer
>>
>> I've browsed a bit and found
>>    SmalltalkImage current snapshot:andQuit:
>>
>> But this seems to require a confirmation. How do I bypass that?
>>
>> I found STimer for timed block execution, but found no way to stop an
>> STimer.
>>
>> Help appreciated,
>>
>> Sophie
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
> -- 
> ===========================================================================
> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
> ===========================================================================
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si



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