On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 10:48, Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr> wrote:
> Markus, you put your finger right on the problem.  That program doesn't
> suddenly start to get slow, it gets steadily slower as it runs.  The
> heap also gets steadily bigger, and the major GC does way too much
> work.

Right, the combination of forcing the GC very often through PCRE and
keeping an ever increasing number of values around obviously leads to
this slowdown.

> Maybe PCRE should change its settings to trigger GCs less often but,
> as Markus said, this doesn't look really important.

I've never seen a case in practice where correctly done regexp
allocations happen so often that excessive full major collections are
triggered.  There is no optimal "general" setting for how aggressive
the GC should be with regexps, but the current value should work fine
for just about anybody.  A still reasonable higher setting would
probably not solve performance bugs of the sort above anyway.

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com