Re: Incremental garbage collection ?

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> What happens is that periodically the PLC scan time jumps from 2-3
> milliseconds to 32 milliseconds which is unacceptable for us.  We believe
> that it is the garbage collection that is kicking in [...]

Well, the first step is to be sure whether the problem is really GC. You
can set a GC tagmethod for tag nil:

  lua_pushcfunction(L, f);
  lua_settagmethod(L, LUA_TNIL, "gc");

After this code, function 'f' will be called everytime Lua does a GC 
cicle. 

If the problem is really GC, I don't think it would be easy to implement an 
incremental garbage collector in Lua. But maybe you can solve your problem 
in another way. 

The API of Lua 4.0 gives you a good control over Lua GC. You can stop it,
force it, and check its internal state. So, if your application has some
"idle" time, you can use it to do a GC, and then you stop the GC during
the critical parts of your system. Something like this (untested code...):


  /* busy time: freeze GC */
  limit = lua_getgcthreshold(L);  /* previous limit */
  lua_setgcthreshold(L, 1000000);  /* set limit to 1G */


  /* idle time; check GC */
  /* using more than 0.8 of the limit? */
  if (lua_getgccount(L)/8 >= limit/10)
    lua_setgcthreshold(L, 0);  /* force a GC cicle */

You can also use some fixed value for 'limit', if you have an estimation
of how much memory Lua can use.

-- Roberto