how to "disable" GC?

[Eijiro Sumii <eijiro_sumii@anet.ne.jp>]

Hello,

I'm trying some very unfair:-) comparisons between OCaml and MinCaml
(min-caml.sf.net), and wondering how to _disable_ GC in OCaml (on
SPARC).  I've tried

  setenv OCAMLRUNPARAM 's=1000000000,v=0x1ff'

and its variants, but none of them seem to stop GC from happening -
and once it happens, it's MUCH slower of course!  By the way, the
machine has 8GB main memory.

So, my questions are:

1. How does the GC happen at all when the minor heap is so huge?  The
   programs don't seem to use so much memory anyway...

2. Some programs get much slower for larger heaps, even though they
   don't seem to trigger any GC.  An example is such programs is given
   below.  Why is this?  (There also exist programs that are not
   affected at all, so this is not because of the initialization
   overhead of the runtime system.)

(**********************************************************************)
let rec tak x y z =
  if y >= x then z else
  tak (tak (x -. 1.0) y z) (tak (y -. 1.0) z x) (tak (z -. 1.0) x y) in
let n = 10.0 in
print_int (int_of_float (1000000.0 *. tak (n *. 3.0) (n *. 2.0) (n *. 1.0)));
print_newline ()
(**********************************************************************)

Thanks in advance,

--
Eijiro Sumii (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sumii/)
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania