[Haskell-cafe] Turn GC off

David Barbour dmbarbour at gmail.com
Fri Sep 30 06:03:42 CEST 2011


Thank you for the clarification. I had read those papers, but I was under
the impression that it was something already part of GHC 7.

Regards,

Dave

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 8:45 PM, austin seipp <as at hacks.yi.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 3:14 PM, David Barbour <dmbarbour at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > minor collections of this nursery do not result in whole system pauses.
>
> Yes, they do. GHC has a parallel garbage collector (so collection
> pauses the mutator threads, and collects garbage -in parallel- on
> multiple CPUs) but it in no way has a concurrent one. Every OS thread
> has its own young-gen heap space, and the old-generation heap space is
> shared amongst every CPU. But any young-gen GC will cause all mutator
> threads to pause no matter what the state of the others is.
>
> That said, Simon^2 has done research on this problem recently. They
> recently published a paper about 'local' garbage collection for
> individual OS threads, where every thread has its own, private
> nursery, that may be collected independently of all other CPUs, which
> promotes objects into the global heap when necessary for access from
> other threads. The design is reminiscent of older work on the same
> topic (thread-local heaps,) but adds a bunch of tasty work they did.
>
> You can find this branch of GHC with 'local heaps' here, in the
> local-gc branch of the git repository:
>
> https://github.com/ghc/ghc/tree/local-gc
>
> This new local collector branch is not, I repeat, not part of GHC and
> hasn't been merged. It's not certain if it ever will be, I think. The
> paper conclusion addresses the fact the scalability improvements as a
> result of this new collector are nowhere near as dramatic as they had
> hoped, and it's not certain the improvements they did get are worth
> the substantial complexity increase. It doesn't address the old-gen GC
> - any old-gen GCs still pause all mutator threads before continuing.
> They do note however that this local allocation strategy could be
> combined with a real concurrent/incremental GC for the old-generation,
> which would help control pause times more over the whole lifetime of
> an application.
>
> You can find all the juicy details in their paper "Multicore garbage
> collection with thread local heaps", located near the top of Simon's
> webpage here:
>
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/
>
> --
> Regards,
> Austin
>
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