GCJ and Boehm GC "Incremental Collection"

[Andrew Haley]

Craig A. Vanderborgh writes:
 > 
 > We are running a port of GCJ 3.3 w/Boehm GC 6.2 on Windows CE v. 4.2 
 > (Xscale processor).  As this is a reasonably low-tech (i.e. CRIPPLED) 
 > platform, we are experiencing long, disruptive delays from "world 
 > stopped" Boehm GC.

One thing that is probably worth doing before you dive in is finding
out where the time is going.  

If you call GC_dump() you'll see the collector's idea of the root set.
For every word in this area, the gc will do some work equivalent to
GC_find_start().

So, for a first-order approximation to the time taken scanning the
roots you can write a function that calls GC_find_start() on every
word that is part of the root set.

Andrew.