On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 07:37:40AM +0900, Kurt Stephens wrote:
> I'm not convinced that the GC is the issue, but I haven't really been 
> measuring it in production environments.   I think common code or Ruby 
> semantics that create avoidable garbage is the issue and would be an issue 
> regardless of GC technology, including reference counting.

Avoiding garbage doesn't solve the problem; if there is a large number
of reachable objects, the mark phase can still take a long time.  This
is why a number of people want a generational collector, because it can
reduce the amount of time spent marking objects.

IMO it's clear that there is no one-size-fits all option.  I wonder how
difficult it would be to make the GC pluggable, so alternate GC's could
be provided as gems?

(obviously there would still be limitations on these GC's; an
incremental collector would probably be out of the question).

Paul