Re: [Caml-list] Question about garbage collection and impact on performance

[Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com>]

Have you tried turning on verbose gc so you can determine how much of
your algorithm's time is actually spent in GC?

Tom Ridge <tom.j.ridge+list@googlemail.com> writes:

> Dear caml-list,
>
> I have an OCaml program which I expect to run in time O((n^3) *
> (ln(n))) say. My expectations are based (unrealistically) on ignoring
> garbage collection completely. As inputs get large, the program
> performs worse than I expect.
>
> My question is: is it possible for OCaml's garbage collection to alter
> the time complexity of my program?
>
> If the answer is "yes", then are there any expectations I might have
> about how bad this alteration might be? For example, (without thinking
> about it too hard) it seems unreasonable for GC to turn a polytime
> program into an exponential time program, but is this actually true
> for OCaml's garbage collector?
>
> I have read some material on OCaml's GC, but I did not form any
> intuitions yet about the answers to these questions.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Tom