A value that starts "1", "y", or "Y" enabled incremental mode
permanently (any value was allowed formerly), while a value that
starts "0", "n", or "N" causes incremental-mode requests to be
ignored.
Although calling `(collect-garbage 'incremental)` in a program with
a periodic task is the best way to request incremental collection, it's
handy for some experiments to have an environment variable that turns
it on permanently.
This change also makes incremental-mode minor collections log as "mIn"
instead of "min", and it changes the first field of the logged
`gc-info` structure to be a mode symbol instead of a boolean.
Make the old-generation marking process incremental
on request, where `(collect-garbage 'incremental)`
makes a request.
Only the marking phase of an old-generation collection
is incremental, so far. In exchange for slower
minor collections and a larger heap, you get a major
collection pause time that is roughly halved. So, this
is a step forward, but not good enough for most purposes
that need incremental collection.
An incremental-mode request sticks until the next
major GC. The idea is that any program that could
benefit from incremental collection will have
some sort of periodic task where it can naturally
request incremental mode. (In particular, that
request belongs in the program, not in some external
flag to the runtime system.) Otherwise, the
system should revert to non-incremental mode, given
that incremental mode is slower overall and can
use much more memory --- usually within a factor of
two, but the factor can be much worse due to
fragmentation.
