es memory requirements

[Donn Cave <donn@u.washington.edu>]

I brought up es "in production" today on a fairly large system, and the
good news is that it seems to be working fine - have not heard one complaint
about anything breaking.  The application in question runs under 400 lines
of es code, so we're not talking about a mammoth program.

The bad news is that it's using 3 to 4 times as much memory as rc did, to
do pretty much the same thing.  That puts it almost in a class with perl.
Most of the memory is allocated at run time - the compiled binary sizes are
pretty comparable with rc.

I'm probably going to have to pull the es code and restore rc, my colleagues
here are getting pretty uptight over the memory (we apparently had some
low on memory problems this morning at only around 300 users, and we expect
more like 500 when things pick up.)

What I'm wondering, since I faintly recall that es uses garbage collection,
would it be possible to influence the collection algorithm?  The application
tends to create a lot of functions and lists and then delete them all at once,
and I'm thinking it might be possible to do something, along with deleting,
that would allow the space to be reclaimed for the next batch of functions.  
(When I say "delete", I mean assign a value of (), as in "fn-oldthing = ()".)

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn@cac.washington.edu