From: nobu.nokada@...
Date: 2004-02-06T13:02:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Is there any way to mark an object as "always in use" (specifically, in a C extension)?

Hi,

At Fri, 6 Feb 2004 11:49:59 +0900,
Harry Ohlsen wrote in [ruby-talk:91669]:
> > Is it the single big hash in process, but not per instance,
> > right?
> 
> There's a single hash table, that's not registered as a Ruby
> object.  However, the data stored in the table are all VALUE
> objects obtained from rb_str_new2().

You mean struct st_table?  If so, you may register a Hash
instance to GC and use its tbl member directly.

> There is a single instance of an object implemented in C that
> Ruby *does* know about, and that object holds many references
> to the strings in the hash table.  For one document, for
> example, there were 2.7 million references to around 87,000
> strings, totalling just under 267,000 bytes of text.  It's
> the ..._mark() function of that class where I currently mark
> all of the strings.

Current ruby's GC is weak for large amounts of live objects.

> While it doesn't *seem* to be taking a huge amount of time to
> do that each time, I'd like to try to avoid it, just to see
> whether that really is the case ... ie, see whether the
> actual time being used is significant.  In any case, if it's
> easy to fix, it just doesn't make sense to keep marking them
> over and over.

Generational GC may help you, but it isn't still incorporated.

-- 
Nobu Nakada