Noisy VM Mode

[lenary]

Sometimes it's useful to be able to diagnose various things via the noise they make, rather than them just printing something.

Someone showed me that haskell has a -B flag that makes your computer beep every time GC runs, and I thought it would be cool/fun/useful to implement for various other languages (including ruby), so I have

It is guarded by also having to enable gc.show so that you get that info as well. I (and others) felt this was the least offensive approach, but they could be made independent in future.

It beeps once for every young generation GC, and twice for every mature generation GC. The beeping is just done by sending ASCII BELL to standard error - so without a terminal/tty it probably won't work.

[travisbot]

This pull request passes (merged 09d22b8 into dd27810).

[jc00ke]

Heh, fun! We'll have to see what @evanphx & @brixen think about this. 😄

[evanphx]

Approve!

[jc00ke]

@lenary can you provide a little script to test this? I'm trying a few things but not hearing a beep. Maybe it's my laptop though.

[tmornini]

My 14 year old son has taught me say SICK when I feel this way!

Fantastic! :-)

[lenary]

@jc00ke What I did to see this:

# make etc
$ bin/rbx -Xgc.show -Xgc.noisy
[GC 100.0% 5743/5743 3 7ms]
[GC 100.0% 13674/13674 3 11ms]
[GC 100.0% 13246/13246 3 16ms]
[GC 100.0% 11037/3304 3 16ms]
[GC 84.8% 8995/0 2 8ms]
rubinius  > require "rubygems"
[GC 96.0% 7319/0 2 6ms]
# => true
rubinius  > Gem::Specification.outdated
[GC 100.0% 10256/3868 2 8ms]
[GC 32.3% 15271/0 1 9ms]
[GC 59.1% 4391/0 1 5ms]
[Full GC 20718kB => 20718kB 23ms]
[GC 20.6% 7671/0 1 4ms]
[GC 49.3% 3892/0 1 3ms]
[GC 90.4% 0/0 2 3ms]
[GC 93.2% 0/0 3 3ms]
[GC 48.7% 5799/0 3 4ms]
[GC 3.7% 7293/0 3 5ms]
[GC 42.9% 856/0 3 2ms]
[GC 93.9% 0/0 3 5ms]
[GC 100.0% 10531/10531 3 19ms]
[GC 100.0% 12556/3383 3 18ms]
[GC 100.0% 13873/5862 3 26ms]
[GC 100.0% 14023/6157 3 22ms]
[GC 88.2% 18296/0 2 20ms]
[GC 100.0% 11125/3001 2 30ms]
[GC 100.0% 14171/252 2 13ms]
[GC 58.7% 24899/0 1 14ms]
[Full GC 27834kB => 34041kB 46ms]
[GC 67.8% 13972/0 1 14ms]
[GC 69.7% 16170/0 1 11ms]
[GC 69.9% 16567/0 1 10ms]
[GC 100.0% 7280/7280 2 13ms]
[GC 100.0% 16759/2613 2 20ms]
[GC 100.0% 16426/4425 2 19ms]
[GC 100.0% 16279/2454 2 19ms]
[GC 69.1% 26040/0 1 15ms]
[GC 69.9% 16488/0 1 15ms]
[GC 65.4% 16647/0 1 15ms]
[Full GC 47071kB => 43659kB 56ms]
[GC 0.1% 10982/0 1 4ms]
[GC 0.0% 37/0 1 0ms]
[GC 0.1% 0/0 1 0ms]
# => []
rubinius  > quit

each time there is a [GC ...] message there should be a bell character sounded.

[jc00ke]

@lenary hmm, I don't hear any bells on my machine. Not a big deal though. I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 on a Lenovo. I can't seem to get any ASCII BELL to work though. echo ^G doesn't work either. :( No bells for me.

[mrb]

This is awesome, 👍

[lenary]

@jc00ke some terminals (like iTerm) can be programmed to do something else when a bell happens - i wouldn't be surprised if you had disabled bells entirely, I have disabled sound but it still flashes (usually). I also have a separate profile which does let sound through, for stuff like this - Check your preferences

[jc00ke]

@lenary Thanks for the tip. I checked around and I think it's just completely disabled for we Ubuntu users when Compiz is enabled so no beep for me! Oh well.