[MLton] self-compiled mlton on redhat 9

[Stephen Weeks]

> top show SIZE ca 810M and RSS ca 650M, but %CPU is very low.
> I noticed I had previously used mlton-20030711-1.i386.rpm
> to bootstrap. I downloaded mlton-20030716-1.i386.rpm, and
> it is just as bad as the self-compiled one. I tried
> to limit -h addressspace 512M, and it started fine without
> trashing, but along the way it couldn't allocate memory
> anymore.

Another thing to try is MLton's runtime options.  E.g. compile with

	@MLton fixed-heap 512m --

> Could this be a problem of the VM in the kernel 2.4.20-20.9
> shipped by RedHat?

I don't know what's going on.  I just did a bootstrap of clean
20030716 sources using a 20030716 binary on a RedHat 9.0 machine with
a 2.4.20-8 kernel and 3/4GB RAM.  I don't see the same thrashing as
you.  There was definitely some thrashing in the first few minutes
while things started up.  But after that, it wasn't bad.