[racket] Rackets memory usage

I wonder about 64 vs. 32 bit.  With other development environments, when people note high memory usage I often see the vendor recommend switching from 64 to 32 bit.

Geoffrey S. Knauth
http://knauth.org/gsk

On May 28, 2011, at 10:50, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> At Thu, 26 May 2011 21:02:35 +0100, Jimmy Coyne wrote:
>> I do have some concerns when it comes to memory requirements
>> however. On Windows if I run a simple GUI program using code from the Racket
>> Windows tutorial where a dialog box is shown with a push button (1.1
>> Creating windows), the private working set is 70 Megs , which is very large
>> for such a small program.
>> 
>> These exe was created by  DrRacket “Create Executable ”. Am i doing
>> something wrong?
> 
> No, I think we have some work to do to improve Racket's memory
> footprint.
> 
> I see about 70 MB for a 64-bit Windows build or a 32-bit Mac OS X build
> using the latest development version of Racket. A similar Java program
> with Swing seems to take about 40 MB under Mac OS X in 64-bit mode.
> 
> Just to make sure, since memory use varies considerably among recent
> versions and platforms, can you say more about which version and
> platform (64-bit vs. 32-bit) you're using?
> 
> For example, I see a 70 MB working set under 64-bit Windows with the
> latest development version, but I see about half that for 32-bit
> Windows and version 5.1.1. For 32-bit Mac OS X, I see about a 70 MB
> footprint for 32-bit development version, 95 MB for 64-bit development
> version (and no significant difference for Cocoa vs. X), and 45 MB for
> 32-bit version 5.1.1.
> 
> The version difference has to do with new support for "places", which
> reserves extra memory for communication among parallel tasks. The
> Windows build tends to be more compact overall due to differences the
> virtual memory API. A lot of memory use is the big language that you
> get from `racket' as opposed to the core `racket/base'. Finally, some
> memory goes into the new GUI toolkit, as opposed to the old GUI binding
> of v5.0.2 and earlier.
> 
>                            latest    latest     v5.0.2
>                           no places  places    [no places]
> racket -l racket/base       8 MB      25 MB       8 MB
> racket -l racket           22 MB      38 MB      20 MB
> racket -l racket/gui/base  41 MB      55 MB      30 MB
> racket -l racket/gui       48 MB      68 MB      36 MB
> 
> Jay and Blake (@ BYU) are working on a whole-program compiler that can
> shrink stand-alone executes by throwing out code that you don't use,
> which will help solve problems with the big `racket' language. Kevin
> and I should look more into limiting the cost of support for places
> when places are not used. I should look into whether the new GUI
> library is using more memory than necessary.
> 
> 
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