3 ms·

For one thing: the second you have a full GC, you're going to need to swap in the entire object memory, dirty those pages, and then swap them back out. It does

For one thing: the second you have a full GC, you're going to need to swap in the entire object memory, dirty those pages, and then swap them back out. It doesn't take a very large image before this brings your machine to its knees.

rcoder 18y ago
Of course, that's only true if you're using a totally flat heap. I don't see any reason why you couldn't be a little more clever about using a hybrid GC approach (generational + thread-local allocation pools, for example) to minimize the size of the dataset that had to be paged in or out in a given sweep. RScheme and other persistent language implementations have certainly been able to use the underlying OS paging mechanism pretty efficiently, and the performance numbers Varnish HTTP cache seems to suggest that it can work well for some kinds of web application workloads, too.
anewaccountname 18y ago
How does gemstone get around the garbage collection issue?