Re: ratio of heap size to live data in Caml GC?

[David.Mentre@irisa.fr (David Mentré)]

Norman Ramsey <nr@eecs.harvard.edu> writes:

>  I assume this means the collector is a mark-and-sweep collector?

As far as I have understood, the collector is a combination of a
mark&sweep (at major collection) and of a generation (at minor
collection) collectors.

You'll find a description of this collector, unfortunatly in french, on
this web pages :
 http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/Livres/ora/DA-OCAML/book-ora088.html


I *think* you'll find a close description of the actual GC in the
following paper. As I haven't read thise papers, you are on your own :

Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy. "A concurrent, generational garbage
collector for a multithreaded implementation of ML". Proceedings POPL
93.
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/concurrent-gc.ps.gz

      This paper presents the design and implementation of a ``quasi
      real-time'' garbage collector for Concurrent Caml Light, an
      implementation of ML with threads. This two-generation system
      combines a fast, asynchronous copying collector on the young
      generation with a non-disruptive concurrent marking collector on
      the old generation. This design crucially relies on the ML
      compile-time distinction between mutable and immutable
      objects. (BibTeX reference.)

Hope it helps,
d.
-- 
 David.Mentre@irisa.fr -- http://www.irisa.fr/prive/dmentre/
 Opinions expressed here are only mine.