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  • Paul Sokolovsky's avatar
    py/gc: Implement GC running by allocation threshold. · 93e353e3
    Paul Sokolovsky authored
    Currently, MicroPython runs GC when it could not allocate a block of memory,
    which happens when heap is exhausted. However, that policy can't work well
    with "inifinity" heaps, e.g. backed by a virtual memory - there will be a
    lot of swap thrashing long before VM will be exhausted. Instead, in such
    cases "allocation threshold" policy is used: a GC is run after some number of
    allocations have been made. Details vary, for example, number or total amount
    of allocations can be used, threshold may be self-adjusting based on GC
    outcome, etc.
    
    This change implements a simple variant of such policy for MicroPython. Amount
    of allocated memory so far is used for threshold, to make it useful to typical
    finite-size, and small, heaps as used with MicroPython ports. And such GC policy
    is indeed useful for such types of heaps too, as it allows to better control
    fragmentation. For example, if a threshold is set to half size of heap, then
    for an application which usually makes big number of small allocations, that
    will (try to) keep half of heap memory in a nice defragmented state for an
    occasional large allocation.
    
    For an application which doesn't exhibit such behavior, there won't be any
    visible effects, except for GC running more frequently, which however may
    affect performance. To address this, the GC threshold is configurable, and
    by default is off so far. It's configured with gc.threshold(amount_in_bytes)
    call (can be queries without an argument).
    93e353e3