Serious GC problem in HEAD

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Neil Jerram <address@hidden> writes:

> That's the latest position.  My guess is that the long periods where
> nothing happens except CPU burning are huge GCs, and that some GC bug
> affecting multiple threads means that these GCs never actually free
> anything (or not as much as they should, anyway).  Any ideas or other
> datapoints would be much appreciated.  Does the Boehm GC handle
> multiple threads?  If it does, perhaps I should try out Ludovic's
> BGC-Guile.

Is it 1.8 or HEAD?

Actually, I'm suspecting my gc-stats patch [0] to cause some GC problems
(although this is quite unexpected since it touches only stat
information).  For instance, consider the following program:

  $ guile -e '(let loop ((a 0)) (loop a))'

If `guile' is HEAD, then the memory consumption of that process (as
shown by `top') continuously increases and at a pretty high rate (!).
If `guile' is 1.8, then that does not happen.

I will try to dig it further and see whether/what can be done.  In the
meantime, you could try to revert the patch.

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2006-01/msg00009.html