On Fri, Dec 08, 2023 at 10:50:13AM +1100, Hill Strong wrote:
> If the daase is so small that it only takes 23 Mbytes to load into memory,
> it would be worth it if it took 100 Mbytes to load into memory. How many of
> our machines would be constrained by this? My current machine is old and it
> has 7.7 Gbytes usable. It is nothing special - a stock standard HP laptop.
>
> The question to ask is: why has this not been done sooner?
Well, memory is there but it does not mean that we should waste it.
I mean, if we gain something valuable, then sure use what is
needed. But using memory just becuse it is there is antisocial
and may lead to troubles. As an example look at GCL: it checks
how much memory machine has and then feels free to use most of
it. So on 64 Gb machine it feels that there is no need for garbage
collection before memory use hits something like 45Gb. One
trouble is that in defualt settings GCL can not cope with that much
of memory, it gives errors because some parts can only handle 2Gb.
Once this is resolve there is another trouble: machine has 40
logical cores (20 physical) and could usefully run 40 copies of
GCL (each on its own logical core). But at 20 copies machine
is thrashing as 20 copies try to use about 800 Gb and this is
much more than what the machine has.
To put is differently, programmers should exhibit common decency:
do not use megabytes when kilobytes would do, do not use gigabytes
when megabytes would do.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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