Re: Reducing memory consumption

[Marc Espie <espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr>]

In article <28169.953559657@upchuck> you write:
>
>  In message <200003192042.VAA00809@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de>you write:
>  > I can see the problem with the overhead of having page-aligned memory
>  > on systems which don't really support that. However, I don't see how
>  > garbage collection would increase memory consumption apart from that.
>Very simple.  We've created a partition in our memory space.  ie, there
>is the stuff that is managed by GC and the stuff that isn't.  There
>may be megabytes of contiguous memory held by GC waiting for reclaimation
>but an xmalloc call can still fail.

Call me stupid, but...
how hard is it to trigger a gc if malloc fails ?

Or is there a kind of `critical section' issue with the gc, that states that
you can't call it everywhere you can call malloc ?

Or is the gc-reclaimed memory not really reclaimed for anything except gc, 
and in particular not usable for a malloc ?