Re: Incremental GC, step multiplier and finalizers

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> This message is a brief summary of these investigations, as it turns
> out that there not so many posts in the list about the configuration
> of the GC, so I hope it could be of some help if others have similar
> issues. It is also usefull to give feedback to the Lua team on
> the usage and behavior of the GC (the call for feedback on the
> generational garbage collection a year ago didn't have many answers
> ;-).

Indeed, this kind of message is very useful (at least for me :). It is
very difficult to have feedback about the GC running on real programs.


> [...]
> 
> What do you think of this? Could it be added in a future version of Lua?

Sure. That "4" in the code was always magical. The problem is to decide
what is the best approach. You already suggested two: make it change
with stepmul or make it configurable. Maybe another option would be to
make it dependend on the number of finalizers queued to run? (For
intance, at each step run 5-10% of what is in the queue.)

-- Roberto