Re: out-of-control GC

[tomas]

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On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 04:47:09PM -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:

[...]

> The bigger the RAM usage, the slower it seems to be.  It might be due to
> fragmentation [...]

Your guesses all make much sense (gc and non-gc data mixed at page level,
forcing the gc to touch many pages, etc.).

To just add one more: total memory usage (gc and non-gc) seems to enter
the gc triggering heuristics [1] (I couldn't follow in detail how, and I
don't know whether this is still valid in the 2.2 branch).

It just might be that Guile is seeing the outrageous process's memory
footprint and tries desperately to free some memory (which of course
can't suceed in your case because most memory usage isn't "guile's").

That might explain the gc being called far too often (and without
success).

Take this with two pounds of salt. My knowledge of Guile internals is
pathetic at best.

Cheers

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/tree/libguile/gc.c?h=v2.0.13#n770

- -- tomás
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