[scala] About GC in Scala

[Xingyang Lu]

Hi, all:

   I am a college student from The University of Tokyo, and I am working on some distributed garbage collection algorithm. I need some well documented testbed of distributed objects run-time environment for my research. I just wonder if scala is a good choice for me? And what is the GC algorithm for Scala actor objects? Can anyone tell me about these issues?

Best regards,

Xingyang

--
路 星洋 (Xingyang Lu)
Chikayama & Taura Laboratory,
Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
Email: luxy@...

[Landei]

Xingyang Lu wrote:

Hi, all:

   I am a college student from The University of Tokyo, and I am working on
some distributed garbage collection algorithm. I need some well documented
testbed of distributed objects run-time environment for my research. I just
wonder if scala is a good choice for me? And what is the GC algorithm for
Scala actor objects? Can anyone tell me about these issues?

Best regards,

Xingyang

--
路 星洋 (Xingyang Lu)
Chikayama & Taura Laboratory,
Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
Email: [e-mail]

Hi!

I'm by no means an expert, especially not for actors, but this is the situation as I understand it: Scala compiles to class files and runs on the JVM, so it uses the GC provided by Java, and as in Java you don't have much more influence on the GC behavior except choosing one of the built-in algorithms and calling System.gc(). Of course Scala isn't limited to Sun's JVM, so you could also compare the characteristics of the different JVM implementations (Sun, Oracle JRockit, IBM...) without changing the code.

Maybe our actor specialists could share some experiences with different GC strategies?

Cheers,
Daniel

[Erik Engbrecht]

"GC" applied to actors is probably a misnomer.  A count of the number of live actors is maintained, with live actors being ones that have started but have not exited.  Actors that have exited may still be reachable, and can even be restarted.  Actors that have not exited can even become unreachable.  Pre-2.7.5 Scala Actors handle this by keeping weak references to the actors, so it can be determined when an actor is not longer reachable.  2.7.5 no longer does this due to some suspected poor interaction with the garbage collector when under high loads, but I think the feature is still in trunk.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Xingyang Lu <luminary.infi@...> wrote:

Hi, all:

   I am a college student from The University of Tokyo, and I am working on some distributed garbage collection algorithm. I need some well documented testbed of distributed objects run-time environment for my research. I just wonder if scala is a good choice for me? And what is the GC algorithm for Scala actor objects? Can anyone tell me about these issues?

Best regards,

Xingyang

--
路 星洋 (Xingyang Lu)
Chikayama & Taura Laboratory,
Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
Email: luxy@...

--
http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/