Scheming and plotting

Another interesting thing to plot is the amount of space that remains in use after the garbage collector runs. This is simply the total size of the heap minus the amount the collector frees (on average). For example, if we start MIT/GNU Scheme with --heap 4096, we'll get a heap of (* 4096 1024) = 4194304 words. With this size heap, the garbage collector will run 1589 times and recycle 6204751035 words, or 3904815 words per collection. This gives us (- 4194304 3904815) = 289489 words that are still in use (averaging over all 1589 collections, of course). If we do this calculation for various heap sizes and plot the results, we get this: