Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > Pointer-chasing is a cache- hostile activity. Garbage collection > involves a lot of pointer-chasing, particularly of dead objects that > have long since been flushed from the cache, compared with reference > counting of recently-accessed objects. Therefore garbage collection > loses performance.
Serious gc's these days only touch live data, not garbage; and they work on small enough regions of memory most of the time (generational scavenging) to not have too many cache misses. Also, hyperthreading seems to be coming back, allowing cpu cores to multitask in the presence of cache misses. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
