Re: [Caml-list] Early GC'ing

[oliver <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Hi,

thanks for your hints.


On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 03:14:26PM -0600, Anthony Tavener wrote:
> I run tight loops (game engine -- 60fps with a lot of memory activity and
> allocations each frame), and the GC works remarkably well at keeping things
> sane. I did have a problem with runaway allocations once, and tracked it
> down to a source of allocations which was effectively never
> un-referenced... so a legitimate leak.
> 
> If you do a Gc.full_major (), is your memory returned? If not, then I think
> that's evidence that there's still some handle on it -- be sure the
> appropriate values have fallen out of scope and aren't referenced in some
> other way!
[...]


It did not helped much.

Not sure if it's a Gc-issue at all, or overhead of the data structures.

I used my full dataset now and top showed me mem usage above 50% (about 50...55).
From 1.9 GB free mem and a resulting file of 254 MB, it means
1000 MB mem usage for 254 MB output data.

Maybe thats just the normal overhead I have to accept. (?)

The input data was 1.4 GB.


(It seemed, the Gc-invokation did made the program run faster. But I'm not sure
if it's an artifact (caching stuff by the kernel or so or my unprecise measurment).
It's about 9 minutes vs. 10.5 minutes, but rather unprecise measured with "top" and eye.)


> 
> On the other hand, if this is just the GC not cleaning up quick enough for
> your case... I'm sorry I have no help for tuning the GC. The documentation
> in gc.mli seemed pretty sensible when I looked at it (a while ago) though!

I had no problem with fast cleaning; rather my limited mem on my machine
was an issue. Looks like I need a new / bigger machine...

The expected worst case of swapping did not occur at all.


Ciao,
   Oliver