[Haskell-cafe] Real-time garbage collection for Haskell

[Sönke Hahn]

On Monday 01 March 2010 01:04:37 am Luke Palmer wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 2:06 AM, Pavel Perikov <perikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Did you really seen 100ms pauses?! I never did extensive research on this
> > but my numbers are rather in microseconds range (below 1ms). What causes
> > such a long garbage collection? Lots of allocated and long-living
> > objects?
> 
> This is all hypothetical right now.  I heard some horror stories in
> which people had to switch to the main game loop in C++ and only do
> the AI logic in Haskell because of pauses.  I would rather not do
> that, especially because this project is *about* proving Haskell as a
> viable game development platform.  So I am trying to be prepared if I
> do see something like that, so that it doesn't put the show on hold
> for a few months.
> 
> Presumably large, long-living objects would cause the generation 0
> collections to take a long time.  I am not sure if we will have any
> said objects, but we can't rule it out...
> 
> Thanks for the positive reassurances, at least.  I'd like to hear from
> people with the opposite experience, if there are any.

Yes there are. I am working on a game with Haskell using OpenGL rendering. 
I've done some frame time measurements lately and encountered single frames 
needing more than 100ms to be rendered. I am currently trying to gather 
information on what is going on in these 100ms and why. From what i 
understand, the GC is running very often and just some (very few) of its runs 
are very slow.

BTW: switching to parallel GC (either with -N1 or -N2 (on a dual core 
machine)) made the behavior MUCH worse, for some reason.

Sönke


> 
> Luke
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