2 ms·
No problem. You might be better off moving back, yes. My understanding of immix-style collection is that it divides the heap into blocks and lines. A block i
by stackghost 7mo ago
No problem. You might be better off moving back, yes.
My understanding of immix-style collection is that it divides the heap into blocks and lines. A block is only compacted/reused if every object in it is dead, and so if you mix lifetimes (i.e. lots of short-lived requests, medium-life sessions, long-life db connections/caches/interned symbols) then you tend to fill up blocks with a mix of short and long-lived objects as users log in and make requests.
When the requests get de-allocated the session remains (because the user closed the tab but didn't log out, for example, so the session is still valid) and so you end up with a bunch of blocks that are partially occupied by long-lived objects, and this is what drives fragmentation because live objects don't get moved/compacted/de-fragged very often. Eventually you fill up your entire heap with partially-allocated blocks and there is no single contiguous span of memory large enough to fit a new allocation and the allocator shits its pants.
So if that's what the HN backend looks like architecturally (mixed lifetimes), then you'd probably benefit from the old GC because when it collects, it copies all live objects into new memory and you get defragmentation "for free" as a byproduct. Obviously it's doing more writing so pauses can be more pronounced, but I feel like for a webapp that might be a good trade-off.
Alternatively you can allocate into dedicated arenas based on lifetime. That might be the best solution, at the expense of more engineering. Profiling and testing would tell you for sure.
- christophilus 7mo agoI love HN. This is gold.
- stackghost 7mo agoHey it's totally possible that I'm actually a golden retriever who has no idea what he's talking about woof woof bark wag wag
- dang 7mo agoThank you!
- stackghost 7mo agoYou're welcome, good luck!
- dang 7mo agoLet's put it in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights!
- PacificSpecific 7mo agoTotally. This kind of stuff is what keeps me coming back.