Re: Garbage collector patch

On Dec 3, 2007, at 1:01 PM, Andi Gutmans wrote:

Hi all, Was hoping to send this off earlier but I was travelling for the past week and had very limited email access. As promised in the past few weeks we have spent a significant amount of time in reviewing the garbage collector work and testing it in our performance lab. Dmitry has been exchanging ideas and patches with David Wang during this time. Suffice to say that as I've mentioned in the past, memory management is an extremely sensitive piece of PHP, which is why it was important for us to review this work in great depth before committing it to the code base. The updated patch still retains the same algorithm as David's original implementation however the data structures have been changed in order to work faster and use less memory. ... Personally I think the decision should be either in or out. Adding this as a compile option is not a good idea as it would create binary compatibility issues and would be a pain for the community. ... The stage is open for ideas/thoughts/suggestions

I'm really hesitant to even *mention* this idea, but.... Could "alternate" memory management systems be made available via PECL add-ons, or, more to the point: What is the *actual cost and complexity* involved in implementing (possibly many) different user-selectable memory management systems, and what other future benefits/drawbacks might we see by doing such a thing? (GC is big now, but what about memory pools per mod_auth user, or SHM/SEM pools, or tuning amounts of memory per function, etc...) I will now apologize to everybody who I just made cry, scream, or damage their furniture, as I didn't mean to hurt you, just trying to stimulate ideas. -Ronabop