[fpc-devel]Re [2]: Some more compiler problems

[Sergey Korshunoff]

PV> From: Peter Vreman <peter at freepascal.org>
>>  But as Peter already said, the heap manager is very optimized. We
>>  got some patches a couple of months ago to make it slightly faster
>>  (10% or so), but I don't think they're already applied.

PV> Because the patches made the heapmanager exponantional slower. The
PV> compiler cycle took then about 5 minutes instead of 1 minute.
PV> It's always a speed versus size tradeoff...
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Are You shure that small RAM usage always assume lower speed?
What about running application which need 100 Mb RAM on PC
with 16 Mb? And how about UNIX which start to kill applications
on low memory condition?

About patches: it is slower because it is trying do not allocate
new block from system if we can get memory by mergeing small blocks.
But this can be improved: ideally we must use memory limit value
for process (`man limits` for UNIX) to start such allocation
politic. If process memory usage is lower than 2/3 of this limit
then we can skip small blocks mergeing: it is what causing speed down.

In such case we would work fast when process memory usage is
low and _fast_ when process memory usage is big: because we continue
to use RAM and do not start swapping.

If You add to runtime a routine which return such limit value
then I modify a patches...

Regards,
    Sergey Korshunoff

PS: There is some strange memory usage in PFC: if to interrupt a FPC
compilation by Ctrl-C and then start it again -- I got new FPC much
faster (more than 10 times) than when I do not interrupt a FPC making.
This is true for my case (16 Mbytes of RAM). I got a result faster
because after interruppt (second start) FPC use _much less_ memory
(less swap is used). But why FPC
keep all in memory? May be it is not to hard to implement such politics:
    -- we start a UNIT A compilation
    -- we found a dependency on UNIT B (in `uses` or `implementation` part)
X)  -- we free all memory allocated by UNIT A compilation and go
       to compile UNIT B
    -- repeat

As I think FPC currently do not perform a X step...