[Haskell-cafe] rts nursery and stopping the world minor gc

[Eric Seidel]

Simon Marlow wrote a paper about this issue a few years ago.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/local-gc.pdf

The conclusion IIRC was that while maintaining thread-local heaps could
reduce the amount of time spent in GC, the benefit was surprisingly
small, and came at a sizable cost in code complexity. So GHC HQ decided
it was not worth merging at the time. I don't know if there's been any
work on that front since the paper though.

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017, at 12:45, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Ruben Astudillo <ruben.astud at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > On 08/06/17 15:08, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> > > It's not just allocation: if it didn't get garbage collected, then
> > > there is *at least* one reference to it that needs to be updated.
> >
> > which reference is that?. Immutability means that old data can't
> > reference the new one, right?. What kind of reference (apart from live
> > data on the stack) can we have on new data on the nursery?
> >
> 
> Another reference within the same nursery. Now consider that the same
> nursery can *also* contain newly created threads, which can be scheduled
> just like existing ones.
> 
> Between two garbage collections, we may have:
> 
> - allocation of new values
> - spawning of new sparks which have access to said values
> 
> If you now have multiple hardware threads, these can be running
> concurrently and allocating their own heap values which reference those
> shared values: for example, each is building its own list of cons cells
> referencing the value in different ways as specified by other values
> passed
> to the thread. Relocating the shared value from the nursery now requires
> updating all such thread-specific cons cells. Those heap values are also
> being promoted out of the nursery, but that doesn't change anything;
> copying them does not magically also update the copied things being
> pointed
> to, that is part of what GC does.
> 
> -- 
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine
> associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com                                 
> ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad       
> http://sinenomine.net
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