[Python-Dev] Linus on garbage collection (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat May 7 10:34:57 CEST 2011

On Fri, 6 May 2011 21:39:10 -0400 Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:

The assertion that "modern hardware" is not designed for big data-structure pointer-chasing is also a bit silly. On the contrary, modern hardware has evolved staggeringly massive caches, specifically because large programs (whether they're GC'd or not) tend to do lots of this kind of thing, because there's a certain level of complexity beyond which one can no longer avoid it.

"Staggeringly massive"? The average 4MB L3 cache is very small compared to the heap of non-trivial Python (or Java) workloads.

And Linus is right: modern hardware is not optimized for random pointer-chasing, simply because optimizing for it is very hard.

Regards

Antoine.

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