Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: the garbage collector is not doing its job

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 08/25/2009 09:16 PM, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:08:24 +0200
> Paolo Bonzini<address@hidden>  wrote:
>
> > > Thanks for improving this central part of gst,
> >
> > It's not improving.  It's making it do what was meant to do.
>
> Oh ... well, if that's so, then it was about time :-)

Ahah :-)

> As an added bonus, I just reran my Iliad benchmarks (with the most recent
> gst and iliad) and the timings are between 5% and 10% percent better.
> Memory usage seems a bit improved, too, but I'm not really sure there.

Good, I couldn't have given numbers, but that would be expected since 
now object allocation is faster -- after the incremental GC finished, 
it's just a

  while (!IS_OOP_VALID (oop))
    oop++;

(Interestingly, one of my first changes to GST ever was to change object 
allocation to use a linked list.  This went away with the new GC, but 
now that the focus on network application is bigger, the incremental GC 
behavior becomes more interesting and using a linked list would make 
sense again.  I don't really feel like introducing even more 
instability, but I have to keep this in mind for the future).

Paolo