Large Arrays and GC

[Robert Jacques]

dsimcha and I debugged this last night. It appears it’s a case of the  
"partly conservative" collector problem.  
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Precise_vs._conservative_and_internal_pointers  
). Essentially, there are values on the stack (including the array’s own  
length parameter) which when interpreted as a pointer, point to the array.  
And the bigger the array, the bigger the target and the more likely at  
least one pointer’s found. The issue were it works but uses too much  
memory, seems to be a case of some allocations ‘sticking’ before the GC  
finds some clear ranges, which it uses thereafter.