sgen is getting ready for production

Monday, May 17, 2010 Pablo Santos mono 9 Comments

Last week I was running some tests together with Mark Probst on our test cluster using Plastic SCM and the new sgen garbage collector.

The load test consists on the following:

Each client downloads the entire project (runs an update from version control)

Creates a branch

Modifies 5 files

Checkins all changes

Goes back to step 1 (up to 5 times)

So, we run 85 clients on 85 different machines against one single Plastic SCM server running MySql on Linux and using Mono + sgen.

The results are: sgen, right now is only 15% slower than Boehm.

As you can see time gets better when you increase nursery size, but what's extremely better is overall memory usage: first VM peak mem is much lower and at the end of the test we checked how RES mem is also much, much lower. During the test memory consumption is also lower and you can see how sgen frees virtual memory (something you'll never see with Boehm, and ends up being a big problem).

version (85 concurrent clients)	time (sec)	Peak VM(Gb)	RES and GC (final)
boehm gc	494	2.4	600
MONO_GC_PARAMS=nursery-size=4m	1007	0.7	200
MONO_GC_PARAMS=nursery-size=16m	640	0.8	200
MONO_GC_PARAMS=nursery-size=32m	589	0.9	200
MONO_GC_PARAMS=nursery-size=256m	568	1.1	200

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.

Plastic SCM proxy server explained

Tuesday, May 11, 2010 Pablo Santos 0 Comments

UPDATE December 20, 2019: Read about the improvements done in the Plastic Proxy.

One of the new features we introduced with the 2.9 release is the Proxy Server. As you know Plastic is all about flexibility, so it can behave as a DVCS or as a centralized system.

When you run Plastic in centralized mode, especially on wide area networks or across VPNs, you'll be hit by network issues: latency, slow down, connection problems... Then you have two options: you can use the distributed system to avoid being hit by the network (setting up a local server at your office to communicate with the central one, then avoiding a huge number of roundtrips), or you can set up a proxy server to greatly reduce network traffic and improve performance.

Depending on your own circumstances, preferences, network resources and so on, you can go from one or the other. At the end of the day what we try to come up with is a good set of options so you can choose.

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.

New style for Plastic SCM 3.0

Wednesday, May 05, 2010 Pablo Santos news 2 Comments

The launch date for Plastic SCM 3.0 is getting closer and together with a full pack of new features and improvements (not yet public) we're going to apply some changes to the main GUI design.

David just sent me a few screenshots with several alternatives.

The first one makes a subtle change on the "workspace information area" to include details about the current task (pulled from the issue tracking system you're using, you know: Bugzilla, Mantis, Jira, OnTime, Rally and so on...).



The second one keeps the previous concept but resolves one request we've often heard from users: reduce the space above the 'view area'.



It also highlights the idea of 'tabs'.

I personally prefer the second one but I'd like to see the 'top area' even more reduced so the 'views' can get more screen space.

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.