[Python-Dev] impact of cycle gc...

[Jeremy Hylton]

Skip,

I don't have time today to look at your post in detail, but one thing
you said rtiggered a pretty immediate response: We should worry more
about the GC performance on examples like the one you posted, and less
about pystone.  

pystone is a good benchmark for testing the overhead in cases when the
garbage collector isn't invoked.  There's so little memory allocation
that nothing interesting happens.  The GC patch ought to have no
effect in this case.  I suppose 4% is okay.

The worry is about programs that allocate a lot of objects, even if
they never create circular references.  The compiler test is one
example, because the parser tree consumes an enormous number of tuples
and objects.

I suspect big slowdowns like the one you posted just mean we don't
know how to adjust the tuneable parameters.

Jeremy