O(N) GC: The patch
dsimcha
dsimcha at yahoo.com
Sun Feb 20 12:19:24 PST 2011
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5623
I've found a way to speed up the GC massively on large heaps without
excessive ripple effects. Technically it's still O(N), but with about a
hundred fold smaller constant in the case of large heaps with most stuff
not scanned. Now, I think the O(N) (where N is the total size of the
heap) term has such a small constant that it's for almost all practcal
purposes the GC is O(S) (where S is the size of the scanned portion of
the heap). It also no longer has any O(N^2) pathological case (which I
had discovered while reading the code).
So far all unittests for Phobos, dstats and
std.parallelism/parallelfuture pass with this enabled. Please test some
other code so we can wring out the corner cases in time for the next
release.
Basically all I did was diverge the Pool struct slightly into large and
small object sub-varieties. The large object sub-variety is used to
allocate objects of at least a page. It only stores gcbits at page-size
offsets, and tracks the offsets of B_PAGEPLUS bins from the nearest
B_PAGE bin so that they can be found in O(1).
I also added a field to the Pool struct so that the number of free pages
in a pool can be tracked in O(1). This should drastically lessen the
time it takes to perform large allocations on large heaps. Right now a
free memory region is found by a linear search through the pools in the
case of large allocations. Unfortunately, I don't see any easy way to
fix this. This patch at least allows short circuiting a large number of
pools, if there isn't enough free space in the whole pool, let alone
contiguous space.
Here are the benchmarks with this patch enabled.
Collected a 10 megabyte heap in 0 milliseconds.
Collected a 50 megabyte heap in 0 milliseconds.
Collected a 250 megabyte heap in 1 milliseconds.
Collected a 500 megabyte heap in 0 milliseconds.
Collected a 1000 megabyte heap in 1 milliseconds.
Collected a 5000 megabyte heap in 3 milliseconds.
Collected a 10000 megabyte heap in 6 milliseconds.
Collected a 30000 megabyte heap in 16 milliseconds.
Collected a 50000 megabyte heap in 26 milliseconds.
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