[racket] garbage collection and process idling

From: Matthew Flatt (mflatt at cs.utah.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 16 21:24:42 EDT 2010

At Sat, 16 Oct 2010 13:40:43 -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Any thoughts on how, by default, timing of garbage collection cycles is 
> affected by whether the process is "idle".
> 
> For example, if non-GC threads are all waiting on events, might the 
> thread with GC be more likely to trigger a GC at that idle time, rather 
> than when some threads are working?

No.

Eventually, we should improve the collector (or replace it with a
better one) to support incremental collection. Then, it would be easy
to use idle CPUs for GC work. Currently, though, if a GC is started,
then the GC has to complete before anything else can happen, so a GC is
triggered only by memory demand or explicit request.



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