[Python-ideas] cross platform memory usage high water mark for improved gc?

[Aaron Watters]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Adam Olsen <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> You can of course tweak gc.set_threshold() (and I would expect this to
> be quite effective, once you find out what an appropriate threshold0
> is for your app.)  I don't believe you'll find any existing counters
> of the current heap size though (be it number of allocated objects or
> total size consumed by those objects.)...


It would be nice if the threshold would adjust based
on the performance characteristics of the app.
In particular it'd be nice if the garbage collector would
notice when it's never finding anything and wait longer
everytime it finds nothing for the next collection attempt.

How about this.
- The threshold slides between minimumThresh and maximumThresh
- At each collection the current number of objects
  collected is compared to the last number collected (collectionTrend).
- If the collectionTrend is negative or zero the next threshold slides
  towards the maximum.
- If the collectionTrend is a small increase, the threshold stays the same.
- If the collectionTrend is a large increase the next threshold slides
towards
  the minimum.
That way for apps that need no garbage collection
(outside of refcounting) the threshold would slide to the
maximum and stay there, but for apps that need a lot of
gc the threshold would bounce up and down near the minimum.

This is almost easy enough that I could implement it...
    -- Aaron Watters

===
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=stupid+animation
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