Re: Garbage collector: is 800kb a good default?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> No, that's not what I was saying.  What I was saying is that in the"idle
>> GC case" the events are as follows:
>> 
>> 1- 100%-N% of the GC runs while idle.
>> 2- the user hits a key
>> 3- the remaining N% of the GC runs.
>> 4- the command runs
>> 
>> whereas in the non-idle GC what happens is:
>> 
>> 1- the user hits a key
>> 2- the command starts
>> 3- the GC gets run
>> 4- the command continues and finiches
>> 
>> To the user, the result is pretty much the same: in both cases Emacs
>> took "time to run the command + time to GC" before responding.
>
> We are miscommunicating.  My complaint was about the _response_ time,
> which is the time that passes between me pressing a key and Emacs
> reacting to that.  In your description above it is the time between
> "the user hits a key" and "the command starts".

The user can't know when Emacs reacts to the key: in both cases there's
no sign of life until point 4 finishes (that's assuming the command is
something like self-insert-command where there's no user interaction
*during* the command).


        Stefan