[pypy-dev] minimum system requirements, build configuration

[Dima Tisnek]

On 5 April 2011 08:54, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote:
[snip]
> I'm rather confident than 64MB is enough, but I also guess that 32MB
> has a chance to work.  With only 16MB I bet nothing much works right
> now (given that e.g. our GC, by default, does not collect before the
> heap grew to at least 16MB).  It may be possible for anyone with
> enough motivation to improve the situation on 16MB.

Ouch! That's something to do.

I'm currently running cpython 2.6 with a bunch of extension in
pre-production on a system that has 32MB in total; and another case, a
slim long-running process that runs on a big server, cpython footprint
only several MB. In the first case, your treshold would create high
memory pressure (bad for os caching things), in the 2nd a saw-like
memory use and perhaps significant latency spikes.

What I'm trying to say, is gc should adapt to run-time behaviour of a
particular script, in some cases 16MB heap threshold would impact both
user expectation and performance significantly.

Put it up on TODO list!

d.