[MLton] self-compile blues

[Filip Pizlo]

After racking up 36 minutes of CPU usage over a period of an hour and a
half and causing about 7 million pageins and pageouts, mlton-compile has
only gotten to removeUnused2 in closureConvertSimplify.  This is during
the self-compile in make all-no-docs.

Is this normal for a relatively fast (1 GHz) machine with a fairly
sizeable memory (1 GB)?

The main problem that I'm seeing is that I don't think that a ram-slop of
0.7 works well for Mac OS X, since the Mac OS X UI needs a fairly large
chunck of RAM to do its thing.  Leaving 300 MB to the GUI is actually not
enough a lot of the time.

But to pick a better ram-slop, I'm curious about the following:

1) How much memory does a self-compile really need?

2) What, exactly, does ram-slop affect?  Is it only the GC'd heap, or is
the whole size of the process taken into account?

--
Filip Pizlo
http://bocks.psych.purdue.edu/
pizlo@purdue.edu