What's new?
Support for Tonel has been added
• Tonel is a text-based file, version control system (VCS) friendly, form to store Smalltalk source code on disk.
• Server Runtime is renamed VAST Runtime.
VAST Platform 2025 (version 14.0.0)
• New Weak Finalization queue sizing allows long-running batch jobs more control over the size of the weak finalization queue
Some customer gave feedback that they had long-running batch jobs doing nothing but running the finalization loop in their images, due to extensive use of weak objects that accumulated over time.
While the size of this queue would already grow dynamically, it's max size held around 1000 weak objects - added as part of global garbage collect.
This is a sensible default if the weak object finalization rate is low, but insufficient when the weak object allocation/expiration rate is higher - without running global garbage collection/finalize loops every now and then, the image would end up consuming extra memory holding on to weak objects that never got the chance to be finalized.
Just increasing the growth limit would not be ideal, since the queue never shrinks.
A usage pattern where there are occasional bursts of weak objects that need finalization, might then grow the queue to a size that would be an unreasonable fixed overhead
To provide a better solution for this, the finalization queue size will now grow/shrink automatically when a finalize cycle completes, based on a suggested size from the VM. This suggested queue size is updated at the end of every GGC cycle, and is based on the old size, as well as how many weak elements that were ready for finalization, but unable to be processed due to the current finalization queue size.
At most, two GGC/finalize cycles should now be sufficient to finalize all weak objects, and in general use, it should not be something that needs to be triggered explicitly. Instead, if the allocation rate is abnormally low/high, one can change the min/max number of weak objects the finalization queue will hold, using new startup/ini parameters. These parameters are available in the .ini file and as command line parameters.
Last modified date: 03/05/2025