--- /dev/null
+'Ancient' module for OCaml
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+$Id: README.txt,v 1.1 2006-10-06 15:03:47 rich Exp $
+
+What does this module do?
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This module allows you to use in-memory data structures which are
+larger than available memory and so are kept in swap. If you try this
+in normal OCaml code, you'll find that the machine quickly descends
+into thrashing as the garbage collector repeatedly iterates over
+swapped memory structures. This module lets you break that
+limitation. Of course the module doesn't work by magic :-) If your
+program tries to access these large structures, they still need to be
+swapped back in, but it is suitable for large, sparsely accessed
+structures.
+
+Secondly, this module allows you to share those structures between
+processes. In this mode, the structures are backed by a disk file,
+and any process that has read/write access that disk file can map that
+file in and see the structures.
+
+To understand what this module really does, you need to know a little
+bit of background about the OCaml garbage collector (GC). OCaml's GC
+has two heaps, called the minor and major heaps. The minor heap is
+used for short-term storage of small objects which are usually created
+and then quickly become unreachable. Any objects which persist longer
+(or objects which are very big to start with) get moved into the major
+heap. Objects in the major heap are assumed to be around for some
+time, and the major heap is GC'd more slowly.
+
+This module adds a third heap, called the "ancient heap", which is
+never checked by the GC. Objects must be moved into ancient manually,
+using a process called "marking". Once an object is in the ancient
+heap, memory allocation is handled manually. In particular objects in
+the ancient heap may need to be manually deallocated. The ancient
+heap may either exist as ordinary memory, or may be backed by a file,
+which is how shared structures are possible.
+
+Structures which are moved into ancient must be treated as STRICTLY
+NON-MUTABLE. If an ancient structure is changed in any way then it
+may cause a crash.
+
+There are some limitations which apply to ancient data structures.
+See the section "Shortcomings & bugs" below.
+
+This module is most useful on 64 bit architectures where large address
+spaces are the norm. We have successfully used it with a 38 GB
+address space backed by a file and shared between processes.
+
+API
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Please see file ancient.mli .
+
+Compiling
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ cd mmalloc && ./configure
+ make
+
+Make sure you run this command before running any program which
+uses the Ancient module:
+
+ ulimit -s unlimited
+
+Example
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Run:
+
+ ulimit -s unlimited
+ wordsfile=/usr/share/dict/words
+ baseaddr=0x440000000000 # System specific - see below.
+ ./test_ancient_dict_write.opt $wordsfile dictionary.data $baseaddr
+ ./test_ancient_dict_verify.opt $wordsfile dictionary.data
+ ./test_ancient_dict_read.opt dictionary.data
+
+(You can run several instances of test_ancient_dict_read.opt on the
+same machine to demonstrate sharing).
+
+Shortcomings & bugs
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+(0) Stack overflows are common when marking/sharing large structures
+because we use a recursive algorithm to visit the structures. If you
+get random segfaults during marking/sharing, then try this before
+running your program:
+
+ ulimit -s unlimited
+
+(1) Ad-hoc polymorphic primitives (structural equality, marshalling
+and hashing) do not work on ancient data structures, meaning that you
+will need to provide your own comparison and hashing functions. For
+more details see Xavier Leroy's response here:
+
+http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2006/09/977818689f4ceb2178c592453df7a343.en.html
+
+(2) Ancient.attach suggests setting a baseaddr parameter for newly
+created files (it has no effect when attaching existing files). We
+strongly recommend this because in our tests we found that mmap would
+locate the memory segment inappropriately -- the basic problem is that
+because the file starts off with zero length, mmap thinks it can place
+it anywhere in memory and often does not leave it room to grow upwards
+without overwriting later memory mappings. Unfortunately this
+introduces an unwanted architecture dependency in all programs which
+use the Ancient module with shared files, and it also requires
+programmers to guess at a good base address which will be valid in the
+future. There are no other good solutions we have found --
+preallocating the file is tricky with the current mmalloc code.
+
+(3) The current code requires you to first of all create the large
+data structures on the regular OCaml heap, then mark them as ancient,
+effectively copying them out of the OCaml heap, then garbage collect
+the (hopefully unreferenced) structures on the OCaml heap. In other
+words, you need to have all the memory available as physical memory.
+The way to avoid this is to mark structures as ancient incrementally
+as they are created, or in chunks, whatever works for you.
+
+We typically use Ancient to deal with web server logfiles, and in this
+case loading one file of data into memory and marking it as ancient
+before moving on to the next file works for us.
+
+(4) Why do ancient structures need to be read-only / not mutated? The
+reason is that you might create a new OCaml heap structure and point
+the ancient structure at this heap structure. The heap structure has
+no apparent incoming pointers (the GC will not by its very nature
+check the ancient structure for pointers), and so the heap structure
+gets garbage collected. At this point the ancient structure has a
+dangling pointer, which will usually result in some form of crash.
+Note that the restriction here is on creating pointers from ancient
+data to OCaml heap data. In theory it should be possible to modify
+ancient data to point to other ancient data, but we have not tried
+this.
+
+(5) You can store more than just one compound object per backing file
+by supplying a key to Ancient.share and Ancient.get. The keys are
+integers in the range [0..1023]. The upper limit is hard coded into
+the mmalloc library. This hard coded upper limit is a bug which
+should be fixed.
+
+(6) [Advanced topic] The _mark function in ancient_c.c makes no
+attempt to arrange the data structures in memory / on disk in a way
+which optimises them for access. The worst example is when you have
+an array of large structures, where only a few fields in the structure
+will be accessed. Typically these will end up on disk as:
+
+ array of N pointers
+ structure 1
+ field A
+ field B
+ ...
+ field Z
+ structure 2
+ field A
+ field B
+ ...
+ field Z
+ structure 3
+ field A
+ field B
+ ...
+ field Z
+ ...
+ ...
+ ...
+ structure N
+ field A
+ field B
+ ...
+ field Z
+
+If you then iterate accessing only fields A, you end up swapping the
+whole lot back into memory. A better arrangement would have been:
+
+ array of N pointers
+ structure 1
+ structure 2
+ structure 3
+ ...
+ structure N
+ field A from structure 1
+ field A from structure 2
+ field A from structure 3
+ ...
+ field A from structure N
+ field B from structure 1
+ field B from structure 2
+ etc.
+
+which avoids loading unused fields at all. In some circumstances we
+have shown that this could make a huge difference to performance, but
+we are not sure how to implement this cleanly in the current library.
+
+Authors
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Primary code was written by Richard W.M. Jones <rich at annexia.org>
+with help from Markus Mottl, Martin Jambon, and invaluable advice from
+Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez.
+
+mmalloc was written by Mike Haertel and Fred Fish.
+
+License
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The module is licensed under the LGPL + OCaml linking exception. This
+module includes mmalloc which was originally distributed with gdb
+(although it has since been removed), and that code was distributed
+under the plain LGPL.
+
+Latest version
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The latest version can be found on the website:
+http://merjis.com/developers/ancient
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