I've developed the gc strategy a bit so that it also takes the time spent in the gc into account. There is now a low and a high garbage level. The gc tries to keep the low one as long as the total cpu time spent in the gc doesn't get too large, then it resorts to the higher one. I thought that could be useful since the gc otherwise can take a lot of time in a process that both has many nongarbage objects and generates a lot of garbage.
I've also added a function Pike.gc_parameters to make it possible to tune these parameters. The current defaults are:
Low garbage ratio: 20% of all allocated things is garbage. GC time ratio: 5% cpu time spent in the gc. High garbage ratio: 50% of all allocated things is garbage.
These are set on feeling only and hardly tested at all. It's therefore very appreciated if someone could do some tuning with a big and busy pike process. (The function Debug.gc_status is useful to get info about the gc performance.)