Re: Reducing memory footprint?

Alan Burlison (Alan.Burlison@uk.sun.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 22:50:05 +0000


Gurusamy,

Thanks for the suggestions :-)

>   + use libperl.so

Done already

>   + use more than one machine + network

Could do - current load generation system is an E10000.  Could also add
a couple of E6500s, but this makes synchronising the whole thing more
difficult.  Network is switched 100Mb ethernet, and I don't think
network bandwidth will be the bottleneck.

>   + use PerlInterp; (single process, multiple interpreters)

No real saving here I fear, as each interp will have it's own parse tree
- yes?

>   + use Thread; (single process, shared compiled optree, multiple threads)

I thought about this - however I'm worried about the 20-30% hit on
performance, and is the LWP library thread-safe?  I suspect not.

>   + use C (and go insane :-)

My colleague who has written the benchmark hadn't used perl at all
before he started.  With very minimal help from me he has got the 8
scenarios written and working in less than a week.  We have already
conidered C, and a dedicated load-generation package - neither of which
would have cut the mustard in the limited time available.  Needless to
say he is now another perl convert!

Thanks for the suggestions - I thought that it would be too good to be
true if there was a 'magic bullet'.  Ah well, I suppose we'll just have
to add in another dozen CPUs and another 6 0r 7 Gb of memory then ;-)

Thanks again,

Alan Burlison