reports problem (and garbage collection)

Wesley wsheldahl@qx.net
Thu, 01 Feb 2001 12:05:05 -0500


FWIW, I searched a guile mailing list for "garbage", and learned that
(a) guile does have performance issues related to garbage collection;
(b) some GC code was changed between guile 1.3.x and 1.4, apparently for
the better; (c) a person can influence how garbage collection is done
either by changing some options when building guile, or in code by
telling it GC "NOW" at whatever point makes sense.  It wasn't at all
clear that any of the options in (c) would actually be helpful, at least
not to me.  I'll let the good GnuCash dev team figure that out.  Oh,
there were also some issues related to their using Gnu MP, and whether
numbers are treated as bignums or doubles.

Hope this helps.  Since I've only been using GnuCash for a few months,
this probably won't be an issue for me personally until the end of 2001,
and even then I could probably make due with monthly reports.

Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> 
> linas@linas.org writes:
>  > out of curiosity, what, exactly, is the problem?  Some O(n^2) loop?
> 
> Yes, something along those lines.  Our best guess is that there are
> massive numbers of strings getting allocated and freed, overloading
> the guile GC.  If you have a look at the code, it's written in an
> extremely abstract functional programming style, so it's very
> difficult to tell exactly what's causing the slowdown.
> 
>  > Does it come back eventually?
> 
> It seems to depend on the guile version.  1.4 copes a little better
> than 1.3 or 1.3.4, which crash, causing a segfault.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Robert Merkel                              rgmerk@mira.net
> 
> "We are excited and optimistic about its usage going
> forward and, yes, we can teach penguins the military
> close-order drill", Mark Norton, US Department of Defense.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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-- 
Wes Sheldahl
wsheldahl@qx.net