Comment Feed for Channel 9 - Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/previewImages/100/467940_100x75.jpg Channel 9 - Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Maoni Stephens is a software developer who spends her time implementing .NET's GC. In fact, she's been working on the GC since the early days of .NET. Andrew Pardoe is the GC PM. The last time we focused on GC on C9 was a conversation with GC creator Patrick Dussud. In that conversation he suggested that we talk to Maoni to get some more deep insights into how the CLR manages object lifetimes. The .NET GC has always been a very efficient and well crafted general purpose collector. Now that CLR 4 looms on the horizon, how has the GC evolved to meet the needs of the future? Maoni has been very busy for the past few years and with CLR 4 the GC team have come up with a new concurrent collection strategy called Background GC, an evolutionary state of concurrent GC. What comes next?From Maoni's blog:Background GC is an evolution to concurrent GC. The significance of background GC is we can do ephemeral GCs while a background GC is in progress if needed. As with concurrent GC, background GC is also only applicable to full GCs and ephemeral GCs are always done as blocking GCs, and a background GC is also done on its dediated GC thread. The ephemeral GCs done while a background GC is in progress are called foreground GCsTune in and meet the main developer of .NET's garbage collector and a recent addition to the team who comes from the native world and will drive GC into the future.Enjoy! en Sun, 26 May 2013 01:41:00 GMT Sun, 26 May 2013 01:41:00 GMT Rev9 Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Fantastic video, really interesting and a great accomplishment the .NET GC is.

I also remember that native vs. managed battle, really very amazing how fast .NET was, in the end the native won but only by writing some lightweight task specific versions of low level citizens, such as allocation, strings and file io..

posted by stevo_

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789610920000000 Tue, 26 May 2009 18:58:12 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789610920000000 stevo_ Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Yeh, the thing with a lot of native developers (not Raymond Chen, but in general) is they look at GC and think "wow, that's kinda complex, that must take a long time", but they forget that memory management takes quite a lot of time however you do it and malloc/free can be slower than a good generational compacting GC - the only way native gets faster is by writing custom allocators and structuring memory patterns so that large chunks of memory can be free'd in one go. Example: in a 3d engine, all the memory allocated while rendering the frame would be bump-allocated from a single chunk and then at the end it all gets free'd in one go by just resetting the pointer back to the start of the chunk.

 

posted by rhm

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789678540000000 Tue, 26 May 2009 20:50:54 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789678540000000 rhm Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Anyway, awesome video. I'm really in awe of the brains behind the CLR, but particularly the GC, because the 'magic' that makes GC work has always been fascinating to me.

I'm currently designing a very simple .NET runtime for a certain embedded platform ( Smiley ) using LLVM and trying to get my head around just a single-threaded 'stop-the-world' (what Maoni calls 'blocking') compacting GC is hard enough. I don't even want to think about how complex it gets with threading - just allowing threading of user code, never mind making the GC multi-threaded. This, along with kernel work, really is the rocket science of programming.

posted by rhm

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789682240000000 Tue, 26 May 2009 20:57:04 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633789682240000000 rhm Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC thats some powerful voodoo.. great stuff Smiley
also fun to see a women in a really technical interview, that doesnt happen often enough imo Smiley wm_in is good but technical it aint Smiley

posted by aL_

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790095690000000 Wed, 27 May 2009 08:26:09 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790095690000000 aL_ Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Hahaha, "whiteboarding is fun... unlike waterboarding" lol Charles is awesome.

posted by ktr

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790114520000000 Wed, 27 May 2009 08:57:32 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790114520000000 ktr Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Great interview, Charles!

Did the GC team talk with MySpace, one of ASP.NET's biggest adopters?  This InfoQ interview (http://www.infoq.com/interviews/MySpace-Architecture-Dan-Farino) indicated that they had performance issues with the .NET garbage collector:

One of our original problems was with the .Net garbage collector. It is just really not designed even on a 64 bit platform to reverse billions of objects and collect and compact without causing at least a noticeable delay. So one of our scaling problems was "Hey, we are going to have to write an unmanaged memory store."

Perhaps MySpace is one of the "external customer" scenarios they test against?

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/10/performance-quiz-6-chinese-english-dictionary-reader.aspx is Rico Mariani's blog post that began his series of posts where he compared the performance of his managed code solution to Raymond Chen's native code solution.  It also includes a handy set of links to Raymond's posts on the subject.

posted by joechung

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790143010000000 Wed, 27 May 2009 09:45:01 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790143010000000 joechung Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Great video indeed!

Charles, close to the end Andrew mentioned that SQL team is working on putting more CLR into SQL Server.

Is there a chance to interview anyone on the SQL team on that? Are we to expect T-SQL being (finally) executing on the top of the CLR (after all, what's the point of having two VMs on a database server doing essentially the same type of work)? Are we (finally) to see a decent programming language that can be used to do rich data processing inside the database server (code near) instead of (frankly utterly outdated and feature deprived) T-SQL? Something like F# with LINQ directly to relational engine (bypassing SQL all together) would be a blessing (after all a relational engine does not have to be SQL).

Cheers,

Seva.

posted by sokhaty

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790785570000000 Thu, 28 May 2009 03:35:57 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633790785570000000 sokhaty Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC I will check in with the SQL team in the near future. Don't make too many assumptions in the meantime.

C

posted by Charles

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791269290000000 Thu, 28 May 2009 17:02:09 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791269290000000 Charles Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC Nice work. But I will still hold back on putting most of my business logic in .NET, so far SQL Server managed this job very well. It scales well and does a good job in multithreading, so I usually put most of the complex BL in SQL Server when things get slow, upgrading hardware is cheaper than building your own version of GC, like MySpace did. I know HPC does a good job balancing load, I don't know however how well it integrates with SQL Server. If not then SQL Server Compute Cluster would be nice Smiley LOL.

 

posted by ivan_

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791705030000000 Fri, 29 May 2009 05:08:23 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791705030000000 ivan_ Re: Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe: CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC And yes some native F# like language for SQL Server would be great and I mean great. Because T-SQL is clumsy.

In fact when I first demoed LINQ to my team some 2.5 years ago they were not excited at all, all of them one after the other were saying it is Visual FoxPro 10 years ago. Of course FoxPro does not have nice security model, but language integration and dynamism was similar to modern Ruby, F# and LINQ Smiley

posted by ivan_

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791706860000000 Fri, 29 May 2009 05:11:26 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Maoni-Stephens-and-Andrew-Pardoe-CLR-4-Inside-Background-GC#c633791706860000000 ivan_