Re: Collecting more frequently

[Michael Meissner <meissner at cygnus dot com>]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2000 at 11:00:44AM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
>   In message <200003172349.PAA24733@kankakee.wrs.com>you write:
>   > If your adventuresome, then a scheme that finds out how close the
>   > machine is to paging, and then collecting on demand might be the most
>   > optimal scheme, but this is far from portable and does introduce some
>   > non-repeatability into the compiler that some us us would hate to see
>   > go.
> I briefly pondered the idea of trying to malloc a large hunk of memory
> in the collector (say a few meg) and if that failed to force a collector
> run and force the collector to free any pages it's got cached.
> 
> The idea was to help boxes with a limited amount of virtual memory which
> do not have a usable mmap such as the m68k boxes I occasionally test on.

Note, on systems that allow you to malloc more memory than is available as long
as you don't touch it (ie, Linux) it will rarely be invoked.  I'm not arguing
against it per se, but wanted to raise the issue in case people weren't aware
of it (it comes up every 6 months of so in the Linux kernel mailing list).

-- 
Michael Meissner, Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company.
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