Re: [Squeak-VMdev] Re: GC improvements

[Andreas R. <and...@gm...>]

[Re: Croquet and GC]
> The problem with making allocationsBetweenGCs is the average objects 
> explored goes up since the number of objects that might live is 
> allocationsBetweenGCs. This increases the incremental GC time by 
> milliseconds which impacts timing for Delays.

Sure does. But on the other hand, an increased number of 
allocationsBetweenGCs causes GC to happen less often and is therefore less 
time consuming (I'm talking about things like >30% time spent in IGC here). 
The best delay accuracy doesn't help if the system is busy running GC cycles 
;-)

> In this example the historical implementation took 57 seconds to build  a 
> teapot, after the change it takes 49 seconds, even if it took a  second or 
> two to manage the full GCs.  I'm grabbed back 8 seconds that  is a good 
> thing.

In this particular example (building a teapot) yes. In other situations the 
tradeoffs are very different. If you are running a game you can not afford a 
hickup every fifteen seconds even if that may make your game run with 57fps 
instead of 49fps.

[Besides I have to admit that I consider "building a teapot morph" a very 
atypical example of Croquet use - it is an artifact of our current lack of 
replication and will go away in the not too distant future so using it to 
discuss how Croquet behaves is just totally missing the point].

Cheers,
  - Andreas