Re: Updating to 5.1w5: My change list

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

on 3/18/05 9:17 AM, Mark Hamburg at mhamburg@adobe.com wrote:

> On a related note from looking at the code, I have to say that LUA_GCSTEP
> doesn't do what I would have thought it would have done. I would have
> expected it to run things forward as if a certain amount of memory had been
> allocated -- i.e., as if totalbytes had been driven up. Or alternatively, it
> could have lowered the threshold by the step amount. Instead, it sets the
> threshold based on the step. Doesn't this mean that calls to "step"
> essentially throw the garbage collector into fully-active mode since the
> threshold will now be less than totalbytes?

This might also explain why one of the engineers on my team found a big
performance gain if he throttled calls to collectgarbage( "step",
size_of_big_data_structure ). The calls may have been triggering more
collection than we expected.

Or maybe I'm just misreading how the various pieces interact.

Mark