Re: Applications of CL-HTTP

To: www-cl@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Applications of CL-HTTP
From: joswig@vampire.lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig)
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 18:41:28 +0100
Sender: owner-www-cl@ai.mit.edu

>The project is in its infancy, so there's not much there, plus there
>is a bug in MCL on the powermac 7100 that prevents multiple streams to
>the server, so sometimes you don't get everything to load, and
>obviously only one client at a time can interact with the server.

MCL 3.0 ?

>One partly humorous but partly serious thing I've noticed about
>cl-http is that it HIDES garbage collection.  When MCL garbage
>collects, the client says "host contacted, waiting for connection" or
>"transferring data" (never, "server garbage collecting").  Why, you
>may ask, is this relevant?  Because when people see those messages
>they naturally blame "network traffic" or some other non-GC thing.

This is a problem of the underlying Lisp implementation. While
doing a complete garbage collection it can't do anything else.
Obviously MCL can't generate any warnings.
You're real problem is, that your application is producing
garbage at all. The first step is to use the ephemeral GC,
which runs in small increments and is less noticable. The
next step would be to identify the main sources of garbage
and to find some way of manual handling or even a way to
avoid consing.

You may also ask Digitool whether they have plans for a garbage
collection which runs as a separate thread. Currently they
are busy doing the PowerPC port.

Greetings from Hamburg,

Rainer Joswig

Rainer Joswig, Lavielle EDV Systemberatung GmbH & Co, Lotharstrasse 2ab, D22041
Hamburg, Tel: +49 40 65808-0, Fax: +49 40 65808-202, Email:joswig@lavielle.com,
WWW: http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/, Tel. (priv): +49 40 7355522

Follow-Ups:

Re: Applications of CL-HTTP

From: weltyc@cs.vassar.edu (Chris Welty)