It's highly dependent on the situation but in my experience the goal is almost always to avoid doing a collection over all 60 gb. It's expensive no matter how you do it. Solutions include spreading the data over multiple processes and/or moving the data outside the managed heap. Ocaml-ancient is worth looking at as well.
What about server that use ~60GB of RAM ? Todays server are sold with 32 to 256 GB of RAM and lot of cpu core.Maybe in such extreme cases, offloading the major collection of the GC could reduce latency a lot ?
2014-07-24 2:05 GMT+02:00 John F. Carr <jfc@mit.edu>:
Most programs spend a minority of their time in garbage collection.
Even if the new GC thread did not slow down the main program,
possible speedup would be less than 2x, probably well under 50%.
For technical reasons, offloading major collections in OCaml is easier
than offloading minor collections, so the potential benefit is less.
> extremely clueless question warning, both generally technically but
> also vis-a-vie ocaml specifically:
>
> so even if ocaml can't so easily be made to support multiple threads
> of ocaml code, could the gc be moved off to another thread? so that it
> could run on another core. would that be of any benefit?
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