What's the go with the GC these days?

Russel Winder russel at winder.org.uk
Mon Jan 7 19:13:59 UTC 2019


On Sun, 2019-01-06 at 22:52 -0800, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 06, 2019 at 07:34:41PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
> > On 1/6/2019 12:28 PM, Reimer Behrends wrote:
> > > In general, a modern precise stop-the-world collector should be able
> > > to handle 1GB worth of pointers in something like .2 seconds on
> > > modern hardware,
> > 
> > I use Thunderbird mail, latest version, and it has random pauses that
> > are up to 10 seconds. It'll happen when I'm in the middle of typing,
> > which is frustrating.
> > 
> > I'm not positive it is a GC pause, maybe it's something else, but the
> > randomness of it suggests it is GC.
> 
> I've experienced a similar effect in Firefox, and though I cannot say
> for sure it isn't a GC problem, I notice that it causes a long spike of
> intensive I/O, and appears to be correlated with occasional segfaults
> and signs of memory corruption / memory leak, and generally happens only
> after significant usage over a prolonged timeframe, generally ending up
> in a state of extreme memory usage (several GBs in resident set size for
> just a small number of persistent tabs) that reset to more reasonable
> levels upon restarting and restoring exactly the same tabs.
> 

Some plugins to JetBrains CLion, IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, and PyCharm (the ones
I use) can be prone to quite lengthy stoppages – sadly the D plugin 1.18
suffers this. Many people blame the Java GC, usually from prejudice rather
than actual data. The Rust plugin had such a problem some weeks back, but it
turned out not to be a GC problem but an exception and logging problem.

Whilst GCs can, indeed do, have problems, some people are too quick to blame
the GC when actually the problems are elsewhere in most of the situations.


-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20190107/7bbffba3/attachment.sig>


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list