[Python-Dev] Billions of gc's (original) (raw)

Aahz aahz@pythoncraft.com
Mon, 29 Apr 2002 22:56:52 -0400

On Mon, Apr 29, 2002, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

Isn't this a case of "knowing your application"? IOW, you're doing something that the gc isn't well-tuned to handle, by default. That's why we expose the its operation through the gc module -- so you can take explicit steps for the hotspots in your application. Not to say we can't improve the tuning, but it'll never be perfect, so just try to make it good enough for the most common types of programs. Then document situations where it might not do so well.

My take is that programs with a million live objects and no cycles are common enough that gc should be designed to handle that smoothly. I don't think that a programmer casually writing such applications (say, processing information from a database) should be expected to understand gc well enough to tune it.

Having read the entire discussion so far, and NOT being any kind of gc expert, I would say that Tim's adaptive solution makes the most sense to me. For years, we told people with cyclic data to figure out how to fix the problem themselves; now that we have gc available, I don't think we should punish everyone else.

Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"I used to have a .sig but I found it impossible to please everyone..." --SFJ