At Wed, 2 Dec 2015 16:23:34 -0800 (PST), JCG wrote: > On Wednesday, December 2, 2015 at 10:44:47 AM UTC-5, Matthew Flatt wrote: > > The development version of Racket now supports an incremental > > garbage-collection mode that can eliminate long pauses in a program. > > For example, incremental mode is useful for avoiding pauses in games > > and animations. > > By chance then will the Dr. Racket environment itself honor the > PLT_INCREMENTAL_GC variable and perhaps benefit from the less noticeable GC?
Give it a try. I think you'll find that long pauses are reduced, but not eliminated. I also expect DrRacket's memory use to be higher, especially at first, but it may smooth out. (It may end up slightly smaller. It may go disasterously bad due to new opportunities for fragmentation. I'm not sure!) One obstacle is that memory accounting is not yet incremental, and accounting is needed for DrRacket's "Limit Memory..." setting. Accounting can be 1/4 or so of the time of a major GC. I don't yet know how to make accounting fully incremental, although I have an idea that may work well in many cases. Another obstacle is that interaction with the background expansion task can sometimes trigger a full collection early. That's likely to happen once soon after starting DrRacket, but not frequently afterward (I think). Overall, enabling incremental mode in DrRacket is a goal, but I don't think we're there, yet. If people try it out and report that it's uniformly better, we could move sooner. Matthew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
