[Biojava-l] Fasta search parsing design

[Hilmar Lapp]

Thomas Down wrote:
> 
> From experience, the Java garbage collector is also rather more
> trustworthy.
> 

This probably strongly depends on the VM you make your experience with.
I actually once and again spent several days in debugging the SGI VM
garbage collector, and ended up having to implement a dirty
keep-a-certain-portion-free type mechanism. On the other hand I never
had a single problem in this respect using Perl 5.6 on SGI, and we were
dealing on a scale of 0.5-2.5GB memory consumption of a single process
(which BTW was impossible with Java).

I was talking to a lot of people, and almost all of them had a special
encounter with the Java VM garbage collector as soon as you challenge
it. I'd be very glad to hear that this has changed meanwhile (but e.g.
the SGI VM I used is 1.2 and pretty recent).

No intention to start a war-type thread here, only a little comment that
VM and their features still may vary widely from OS to OS.

	Hilmar
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Hilmar Lapp                                email: hlapp@gmx.net
GNF, San Diego, Ca. 92122                  phone: +1 858 812 1757
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