[Self-interest] memory systems in Linux and Mac virtual machines

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Wed Apr 6 00:59:32 UTC 2022


A while back I wanted to show off the Self spy to illustrate a point to
a friend. To stress the memory system so it would be clear how it worked
I started by creating a small vector:

    vector copySize: 1000

and then filled it in with a bunch of other vectors:

    0 to: size-1 Do: [| :i | at: i Put: (vector copySize: 10)]

then at each step I doubled the size of the leaf vectors:

    0 to: size-1 Do: [| :i | at: i Put:
	                (vector copySize: 2*(at:i) size)]

Just to keep track where we were, after each step I would evaluate

    (at: 0) size

As expected, the system was forced to create a new segment by the time I
got to 2560. It crashed on the next step, though sometimes I got one
more step before it crashed. At this point the heap is only a few
megabytes in size, so this shouldn't be a problem.

This was a 2017 Linux virtual machine. Today I had the idea to try the
exact same thing on a 2017 Macintosh virtual machine. With it I was able
to get all the way up to 81920 and it didn't crash like in Linux but the
infamous colored beachball has been spinning for a couple of hours now.

Not counting object headers, this step is trying to grow the heap from
about 320MB to around twice that. The spy showed exactly what I wanted
to illustrate with the old space having grown to around 90 segments.

I had expected the behavior of both VMs to be the same, but it seems
that the Linux version it less stable. Does anyone else have a similar
experience?

-- Jecel


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