Memory Allocation in low RAM environments

J

John Snowdon

Reading up on garbage collection and memory allocation in Ruby and I've
just learned of the fact that Ruby allocates a minimum heap of
8000kbytes.

Is there anything I need to be wary of if reducing this to something
much smaller, like say between 512-1024kbytes?

I think that minimum heap size is causing me problems in my Arm-WinCE
environment where we get approx 38000-40000kbytes to use from the
initial 64megabytes, once the OS and framebuffer has taken its share.

-John
 
J

Jano Svitok

Reading up on garbage collection and memory allocation in Ruby and I've
just learned of the fact that Ruby allocates a minimum heap of
8000kbytes.

Is there anything I need to be wary of if reducing this to something
much smaller, like say between 512-1024kbytes?

I think that minimum heap size is causing me problems in my Arm-WinCE
environment where we get approx 38000-40000kbytes to use from the
initial 64megabytes, once the OS and framebuffer has taken its share.

-John

In the gc.c file you'll find:

#ifndef GC_MALLOC_LIMIT
#if defined(MSDOS) || defined(__human68k__)
#define GC_MALLOC_LIMIT 200000
#else
#define GC_MALLOC_LIMIT 8000000
#endif
#endif

You may try playing with that number. Warning: I know almost nothing
about ruby internals,
so I won't tell you the possible consequences, nor the sensible lower
bound for the number.

Jano
 

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