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Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

Yep, that's basically it.

It sounds crazy (and it is!) - but it often works reasonably well in practice. SBCL (one of the most performant Common Lisp implementations) has an 'imprecise gc' that works the same way - and I've seen reasonably heavily stressed processes with uptimes in the weeks/months.

Remember, even a few years ago (before fastthread, etc) a reasonably loaded Ruby on Rails app couldn't stay up for more than ~10 minutes w/o memory leaks forcing a restart (DHH said 37Signals as doing ~400 restarts/day per process, IIRC) because the runtime was such a piece of crap. Yet, many people still used it to solve real problems and make real money.

At least Go's memory leaks are much slower than Ruby's ;-)

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The SBCL garbage collector doesn't work like described in the grandparent comment. It's precise for the heap, and only conservative for the registers and stacks.

I can't say for sure how the Go GC works, but I would assume it likewise isn't fully conservative. E.g. the "avoid struct types with both integer and pointer fields" advice would be pointless for a fully conservative GC, but does make sense if structs containing no pointers are allocated in a separate memory region that's not scanned for potential pointers.

I don't know anything about SBCL, but in Go the GC is used only for the heap, data allocated on the stack disappears as soon as the function returns, and registers have nothing to do with any of it.

Both data on the stack and registers may potentially contain the sole live pointer to a particular heap object, so unless you only run GC from some sort of main event loop, it's generally necessary to treat the stack and registers as potential roots as well.

Yes, but there are going to be pointers to heap objects in registers and on the stack.

But Ruby is more or less a "rapid development" environment.

You pay for quick development turn-around with machines.

Go is not in that kind of space as far as I know since, as I understand it, Go is sold as low-ish level language competing with C++ and C for system development. For something that would replace those languages, unexplained, systematic leaks would be bad (I mean, my C++ programs might leak but it's reasonably easy to discover why. That matters).

From experience, development in Go can definitely be classified as rapid. The type system stays out of your way, and compile times are insignificant. Try compiling on play.golang.org, or tour.golang.org to see what I mean.

About this issue: yeah, its unfortunate, but its a property of the class of garbage collector that Go uses atm. My servers are all 64-bit, so doesn't really affect me. But I do feel bad for those who are trying to run Go on ARM, or on 32-bit servers.

Probably Golang developers/implementers should change their compiler to insert "magic" constant before each 32-bit pointer in the GC memory, so all such pointers could be quickly discovered during full linear scan of the heap during GC, regardless of target address.

This "magic" constant should be non-valid value in 32-bit single precision float point format, far away from usual mmap()'ped address ranges, and far away from small integers.

Maybe this "magic" value should be randomized to prevent DoS attacks on Go runtime library.

Would that gc scheme potentially cause the following (pseudo) code to break?

  x = malloc(1); // allocates block 'a' in memory
  int i = (int) x;
  x = 0;
  i = i - 1;
  // gc runs here and frees 'a'
  *( (int*)(i + 1) ) = 123; // failure

You'd have to insert a call to "malloc" to get the GC to run, but yes, it can break in that situation. (The classic example is an XOR-packed linked list being corrupted by the Boehm GC.)

But note that isn't really fair to conservative GC, as no GC, precise or not, can cope with hidden pointers like that. So your example isn't really a strike against Go.

When Go gets a precise collector, simple implementations of this will work. Doing this kind of thing in Go requires importing the "unsafe" package, and any memory allocations done by code importing "unsafe" could be marked as possibly a pointer.

However, it would probably be possible to write code involving two packages, one of which does not import "unsafe", to lead to dangling pointers and eventual crashes. That is why you should be careful about code that imports "unsafe".

Actually, the code sample in the grandparent comment obfuscates the memory address by subtracting 1. Even a conservative GC will be confused in this case...

Ah, yes, missed that. Nothing a GC can do about code like that. At least it remains true that this can only happen in Go if you explicitly import "unsafe".

I don't think any GC scheme could work with that. Languages that allow pointer arithmetic like that basically can't be GC'd.

The problem with an imprecise GC is that having an integer that looks like a pointer, could prevent an object from being freed.

Almost — C# has a cool feature whereby you can do pointer arithmetic if you pin the objects in question first, so the GC won't collect or move them. (The language statically enforces this by forbidding you from taking the address of a value until you pin it.)

That's cool; I think another way of doing it is to allow programs to request a sandbox where the GC doesn't go so they can do all of the pointer-arithmeticking they want as long as all their pointers fall within the sandbox by the time they're written through or dereferenced.

In Go, you'd have to be using the unsafe package and some gnarliness to cast between the allocated pointer and int, so you just wouldn't be able to do this in vanilla Go.

That's really interesting - is there a place where I can read more about these early Rails performance issues?

There was some back-and-forth between Zed Shaw and DHH that I remember being interested by at the time. Zed deleted all his posts - but here are some places to get started:

- Shaw's opening volley: http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw... [lots of stupid personal flames - but his technical points are consistent with what I remember from the time]

- DHH's response: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/31-myth-2-rails-is-...

- I can't find a copy of shaw's actual response, but here's the relevant HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364659

The salient point (quoting Zed):

"""

Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Repeat that to yourself. “He couldn’t keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average.”

"""

I've never been much of Ruby/Rails guy - but my understanding is that everyone had to restart Rails a few times an hour cause the memory leaks were so bad in those days.

I certainly wasn't anywhere in the loop, but at least on my site, FastCGI didn't work, and Mongrel did.

Zed's rant/flame goes into so much personal detail that he doesn't really articulate the point. Rails was receiving this enormous amount of hype, but there wasn't even a working application server yet.

I started using rails after all of that, but regardless of how it was back then, I think it's worth pointing out for people who aren't aware - there are really good app servers for rails now.

No one cares how the sausage is made. They care that they have sausage. I write code to make money, not for uptime competitions. If something that makes money needs to be restarted every 4 minutes and customers are willing to pay for it why should I give a shit?

FCGI problems were very customer-visible. Prior to Zed coming along, the issue wasn't being discussed much anywhere, making it unclear if it was your code, ruby issue, framework issue, or appserver. Now it is your problem to fix!

Sometimes I wonder if the incredible fall in DRAM prices was really a good thing... ;)

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