General Problems for GC'ed Applications?

[renox]

Karen Lanrap wrote:

> I see three problems:
> 
> 1) The typical behaviour of a GC'ed application is to require more 
> and more main memory but not to need it. 

I think you're going overboard here, but it's nonetheless true that 
there are conflicting needs: the less GC pass there are, the more 
efficient is your application running (for non-interactive application 
of course, otherwise 'pause time' is a problem) .. until you run out of 
memory and either swap starts to be a big problem or disk access 
efficiency is reduced.

But there is research to make the OS and the GC cooperates, for example:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/04-16.pdf

Now the problem is obviously that the OS won't implement this until a GC 
needs it and vice versa, with Linux this could be probably done (that's 
what the researchers used), for Windows, forget it (unless .Net 
implement this of course and even in this case, it's not obvious that it 
would be an 'open' API).

Regards,
RenoX