problem with shared heap?

[Marc Feeley]

> The answer is yes. For example in cases where many processes are
> spawned which create a lot of garbage and then die. In the normal
> heap case, the cleanup is almost instantaneous. With a shared heap,
> garbage collections need to be done.

No this is a case where performance should be good.  The worst case is
where a lot of small processes (i.e processes which allocate very
little and then die) are created AND there are lots of live objects
globally (i.e. at least one process is holding on to a lot of data in
the shared heap).  When a good GC is used for managing the shared
heap, reclaiming garbage doesn't cost anything.  See my paper on
the "unified heap approach" at the 2001 Erlang workshop.

Marc