Three Approaches to Heap Sizing
wingolog.org
wingolog.org
It's clear that there will always be some level of heuristic badness and a proliferation of knobs and dials to tune for optimal system performance. However, having a general framework for approaching heap sizing can provide structure and limit the number of knobs to a manageable amount.
For me, Forth, with its small memory footprint and ability to manipulate memory directly, can be leveraged to help solve heap sizing issues. Its flexibility in managing memory both interactively and an each function/word can allow for a more efficient use of resources and possibly reduce the need for complex heap sizing algorithms. Well, that is my very biased opinion anyways.
It was a great read.
Forked node processes for instance can send an event when they first call listen(). That doesn’t work for all application architectures, but it would be easy enough for a program to tell when it’s about to shift into a different mode and adjust behaviors.
It seems that it boils down to "Give the process twice the heap and it spends half the time garbage collecting?"
Looking at the graphs, the old garbage collector didn't tend to expand without bound, it clearly had a smaller max size than the new one. In addition, the old GC was pretty near the "knee" of the curve, if you allocate less memory GC time goes up, if you allocate more memory GC time goes down.
I'm seeing that you get about 20% improvement at the center, at the expense of twice the delay or twice the memory at the ends.
Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting this?
"Pebblesorters value creating heaps of pebbles that have a prime number of stones in them, and are horrified by heaps of pebbles with the "wrong" number of stones. We humans can understand the rule behind their moral intuitions (better than they can, even, since they seemingly haven't realized the rule they're following), but even though we understand what's "right and wrong" from their perspective we still find sorting pebbles a pointless waste of time.
Many humans think that any advanced enough artificial intelligence will be moral and good, because it'll be smart enough to understand right from wrong. And an advanced enough AI will understand human morality - maybe better than we do, even, it could perhaps deduce and codify the rules that humanity has been stumbling towards over our millennia of moral progress. But, despite understanding, it won't care any more than understanding pebblesorter morality makes us want to sort pebbles."
If you're going to use analogies, use analogies.
Sometimes you have to drop the cleverness and just talk to people.