Reducing the cost of garbage collecting small arrays

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Is 5 the optimal number of bits to slice off at a time (ie the best
>>> fanout)?  It sounds like node copy cost on insert argues for a
>>> slightly narrower fanout.  You'll be evacuating / scanning more words
>>> total, but new nodes may equate to less scanning overall (especially
>>> if this is running long enough to have some nodes get tenure).
>>
>> I'm experimenting with this. 6 is far too much, making inserts 4-5x
>> slower. 4 doesn't seem to improve things much (which is a bit
>> counter-intuitive given that 6 made things so much work), but I need
>> to experiment some more.
>
> After some more testing I can improve the performance of insert by 30%
> by reducing the array size from 32 to 16. GC still dominates though.

Yes, I'd still expect that; internal node churn with fat nodes
exhausts heap more quickly than usual.  If large nodes become the
norm, cranking up GC nursery size might be in order.

It's great to see that fat nodes finally work well in GHC, though.
When I first tried this in the 90's it was so bad (due to the extra
level of indirection & write barrier problems) I gave up in
frustration.

-Jan

>
> Johan
>