Re: Allocating many workspaces.

[John Darrington]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 03:27:12PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

     >      Here's another idea that comes to mind: is there a maximum number
     >      of categories that makes sense?  Would a "max categories" setting
     >      defaulting to, say, 1000, still allow most users to get real work
     >      done in realistic cases?
     >
     > 1000 would be much too high.  How many machines can allocate 64GB of 
heap?
     > "Realistic cases" is somewhat subjective.  But I cannot envisage that in 
     > most instances more than 20 categories would be involved - but who knows?
     
     I mean, 1000 categories per instance, not 1000 instances.

I think I've lost track of what we mean by "instance".

     Presumably, 1000 categories do not need much memory (a few
     kilobytes?) unless the space for categories is, say, O(n**2) in
     the number of categories (I haven't looked).

Yes.  If there is a very large number of categories, then it is highly likely
that each category contains only a small number of cases.  But we don't
know that a priori.  

The partcular problem I encountered stems from the fact, that for every 
category, I'm calling sort_create_writer, which in turn allocates space for a 
large number of cases - even if they are never used.  I think I can solve
that problem by sorting the cases before categorising.  But I'm wondering if
similar situations will arise where such an optimisation cannot be done.

J'


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