[PATCH] Add runtime option to fix randomization seed on startup

[Peter Bex]

Hi all,

Megane looked into #1650 and found out that the srand(time(NULL)) call
is the culprit; due to the hash table randomization the number of GCs
can differ on every run.

This led me to think that this could be one reason our benchmarks are so
noisy, so I added a runtime option to fix the randomization factor on
startup.  This does indeed completely remove all deviation on the
"number of major GCs" metric in the CHICKEN benchmarks, but unfortunately
doesn't seem to do all that much for the cpu-time or GC time metrics.

Oh well, I think it could be useful enough anyway, and perhaps a good
first stab at reducing the noisiness of our benchmarks.

The patch should speak for itself.

Cheers,
Peter

0001-Add-new-R-runtime-option-to-influence-how-srand-is-c.patch
Description: Text Data

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature