Periodic long GC's when just coding in newer Pharo 7's?

I thought I would mention this as its something I’ve only just started to notice… when doing some brief coding sessions (as in, each day I unsuspend my laptop and code for 30-40 minutes - to write some missing tests) - I have started to notice I get a spinning beach ball in Pharo for 15+ seconds and then it recovers. It’s usually once each day, and it does recover.

It feels like its deciding to do a GC - but I’m not sure how to tell. It could be nothing - but its not something I’ve noticed in Pharo 6.1 and seems unique to Pharo 7 (which I’ve started to try using more recently).

Its just happened now in build 1167 64bit on OSX (I believe I have the newer vm - as I had to re-download them for pharo-launcher).

Tim

How big is your image?  





Tim Mackinnon wrote




--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Hi Tim,


On Fri, 7 Sep 2018 at 18:02, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I thought I would mention this as its something I’ve only just started to notice… when doing some brief coding sessions (as in, each day I unsuspend my laptop and code for 30-40 minutes - to write some missing tests) - I have started to notice I get a spinning beach ball in Pharo for 15+ seconds and then it recovers. It’s usually once each day, and it does recover.
>
> It feels like its deciding to do a GC - but I’m not sure how to tell. It could be nothing - but its not something I’ve noticed in Pharo 6.1 and seems unique to Pharo 7 (which I’ve started to try using more recently).
>
> Its just happened now in build 1167 64bit on OSX (I believe I have the newer vm - as I had to re-download them for pharo-launcher).

Hopefully someone who is a regular OSX user can comment on whether
they've seen similar behaviour.  I haven't seen this on linux.

One thing to try is the equivalent of (on linux):

kill -USR1 <pharo pid>

That will ask the VM to dump it's current state to stdout / stderr (I
forget which).

Maybe try it while the system is responding so you can see the sort of
information that is provided, and then when you get the spinning beach
ball.

HTH,
Alistair

Good point Paul - its a reasonably fresh image that is now 96.2mb - so not massive.

I’ll experiment with what Alistair has said.

Tim