Re: GC question

Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:
> Now, here's the harsh truth that applies to all conventional
> Garbage Collectors. As your live data grows in size, the
> smallest achievable product of those two fractions will tend
> to increase. The smaller the fraction of the memory space
> that your system allows to be floating garbage, the larger
> the fraction of CPU power your GC will use. The smaller the
> fraction of CPU power you devote to it, the greater will be
> the fraction of your memory arena devoted to holding floating
> garbage. ...


Thanks for this detailed reply, which I'm still trying to digest.


> It is much cheaper in the long run to double the size of the memory
> arena each time you run out of space - then you get costs linear
> with the size of your final memory arena.


Right, I think there's no way around this. I had thought of
generation scavenging in terms of doubling the time between
collections at each generational level, avoiding the O(N**2) time
complexity, but that has the same effect on memory consumption as
doubling the arena size on running out of space.

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