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authorAntoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net>2009-01-09 22:27:08 (GMT)
committerAntoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net>2009-01-09 22:27:08 (GMT)
commit14b78f5fc54fa96a084b26597ede891e88b9fc05 (patch)
treeed2fed7abcc9952241c72ea71bd4ac63cf8de122 /Modules/gcmodule.c
parent9169641b8b2995abb651826887773eb12cbf6064 (diff)
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Merged revisions 68462 via svnmerge from
svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk ........ r68462 | antoine.pitrou | 2009-01-09 22:40:55 +0100 (ven., 09 janv. 2009) | 6 lines Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e. collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by Martin von Löwis at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html. ........
Diffstat (limited to 'Modules/gcmodule.c')
-rw-r--r--Modules/gcmodule.c66
1 files changed, 65 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Modules/gcmodule.c b/Modules/gcmodule.c
index 8462ee9..2474721 100644
--- a/Modules/gcmodule.c
+++ b/Modules/gcmodule.c
@@ -68,6 +68,55 @@ static PyObject *gc_str = NULL;
/* Python string used to look for __del__ attribute. */
static PyObject *delstr = NULL;
+/* This is the number of objects who survived the last full collection. It
+ approximates the number of long lived objects tracked by the GC.
+
+ (by "full collection", we mean a collection of the oldest generation).
+*/
+static Py_ssize_t long_lived_total = 0;
+
+/* This is the number of objects who survived all "non-full" collections,
+ and are awaiting to undergo a full collection for the first time.
+
+*/
+static Py_ssize_t long_lived_pending = 0;
+
+/*
+ NOTE: about the counting of long-lived objects.
+
+ To limit the cost of garbage collection, there are two strategies;
+ - make each collection faster, e.g. by scanning fewer objects
+ - do less collections
+ This heuristic is about the latter strategy.
+
+ In addition to the various configurable thresholds, we only trigger a
+ full collection if the ratio
+ long_lived_pending / long_lived_total
+ is above a given value (hardwired to 25%).
+
+ The reason is that, while "non-full" collections (i.e., collections of
+ the young and middle generations) will always examine roughly the same
+ number of objects -- determined by the aforementioned thresholds --,
+ the cost of a full collection is proportional to the total number of
+ long-lived objects, which is virtually unbounded.
+
+ Indeed, it has been remarked that doing a full collection every
+ <constant number> of object creations entails a dramatic performance
+ degradation in workloads which consist in creating and storing lots of
+ long-lived objects (e.g. building a large list of GC-tracked objects would
+ show quadratic performance, instead of linear as expected: see issue #4074).
+
+ Using the above ratio, instead, yields amortized linear performance in
+ the total number of objects (the effect of which can be summarized
+ thusly: "each full garbage collection is more and more costly as the
+ number of objects grows, but we do fewer and fewer of them").
+
+ This heuristic was suggested by Martin von Löwis on python-dev in
+ June 2008. His original analysis and proposal can be found at:
+ http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html
+*/
+
+
/* set for debugging information */
#define DEBUG_STATS (1<<0) /* print collection statistics */
#define DEBUG_COLLECTABLE (1<<1) /* print collectable objects */
@@ -795,8 +844,16 @@ collect(int generation)
move_unreachable(young, &unreachable);
/* Move reachable objects to next generation. */
- if (young != old)
+ if (young != old) {
+ if (generation == NUM_GENERATIONS - 2) {
+ long_lived_pending += gc_list_size(young);
+ }
gc_list_merge(young, old);
+ }
+ else {
+ long_lived_pending = 0;
+ long_lived_total = gc_list_size(young);
+ }
/* All objects in unreachable are trash, but objects reachable from
* finalizers can't safely be deleted. Python programmers should take
@@ -890,6 +947,13 @@ collect_generations(void)
* generations younger than it will be collected. */
for (i = NUM_GENERATIONS-1; i >= 0; i--) {
if (generations[i].count > generations[i].threshold) {
+ /* Avoid quadratic performance degradation in number
+ of tracked objects. See comments at the beginning
+ of this file, and issue #4074.
+ */
+ if (i == NUM_GENERATIONS - 1
+ && long_lived_pending < long_lived_total / 4)
+ continue;
n = collect(i);
break;
}