[racket-dev] gc vs assignment

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Neil Toronto <neil.toronto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>
>> Catching up with some mail.
>> Neil wrote:
>>>
>>> Avoiding allocation reduces GC collects, which reduces stutters and
>>> hitches.
>>
>> My (possibly old) understanding of GC and mutation tell me that this
>> is one of those prejudices that programmers should get rid of. Every
>> mutation goes across an access barrier in a GC like ours and can thus
>> be much more expensive than a lightweight allocation. This was
>> certainly true for early generational collectors. I do know that the
>> hordes of Java programmers who invaded GCLand forced GC builders to
>> make C/C++-like programs in Java work reasonably fast with collectors
>> and so collectors changed.
>
> In my defense, I was talking about framerate, not total or average cost of
> memory management. A GC pause in my game test app lasts 50ms to 200ms, which
> causes a "hitch": a noticeable, temporary drop in framerate and
> responsiveness, in this case down to 20Hz to 5Hz. For comparison, 60Hz is an
> ideal minimum. A sequence of minor hitches is a stutter; sometimes Racket's
> GC pause causes those as well.
>
> Inflicting hitches on users in a twitch game is a cardinal sin. In
> non-twitch games they are eye-wrenching, especially when everything else is
> smooth. Games are really almost real-time apps.

Totally disagree. Here's a crazy forum where you will find people
complaining about how a recent release (DeathSmiles - North America
for Xbox360) is garbage because there isn't ENOUGH slowdown as
compared to the Japanese 360 or XBox release:

http://www.aksysgames.com/forums/topic/732

I do agree that you personally don't want a drop in frame rate and
that the GC gets in your way of achieving that goal.

Jay

>
> I'm still doing the game universe-style, so I haven't moved to mutation yet.
> I'm halfheartedly considering it. I'll probably try an allocation pool of
> same/similar-sized arrays first. I'd gladly pay half of my ideal 16ms per
> frame to eliminate hitches.
>
> Neil T
>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://teammccarthy.org/jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93