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

[Stefan Monnier]

>> > 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).
>
> Even for self-insert-command, I can easily know whether the command
> started or not, because I have garbage-collection-messages turned on.

Forget it, you don't seem to be able to understand my point, which is
that idle-GC just moves the moment the GC happens.  Without it, GC is
pretty much guaranteed to slow down execution of the user's command.

So if occasionally the user hits a key during the idle-GC, he just gets
to experience the delay that he would otherwise *always* experience.

> timers kick in.  As result, I needed to tune several long-running idle
> timers.  I'd hate to see GC becoming one of them.

The purpose of the idle-GC is not to *add* more background activity, but
to move activity from active time to idle time.  So if it works as
intended it is not comparable to those other long-running idle timers.


        Stefan