[gclist] GC and OODBMSes: any experience?

[Charles Fiterman]

>Note that I am currently not interested in garbage collecting the
>database (GCing 10 petabytes would take a bit too long :-) but just
  petabytes??
>using the collector for transient data.  I imagine that if the database
>does not hold secret root pointers, there shouldn't be any problems.

There are no serious problems as the database doesn't have pointers
back to program data. We had the following minor glitch. The database
used VirtualAlloc (NT Microsoft C++) to get storage and we treated
the data it got that way as root segments. Since they were large
and in fact had no pointers scanning them was inneficent. We added
a gcAddLeafRoot(void * startRoot, size_t sizeRoot) function to tell
the collector that these areas didn't have to be scanned.

Charles Fiterman	Geodesic Systems
Phone 312-728-7196	4745 N. Ravenswood Suite 111
Fax   312-728-6096	Chicago Il 60015
cef@geodesic.com

A computer language without garbage collection
  is like a city without garbage collection.