This is conceptually similar to the phase that was added to the non-free-threaded GC. Start with a set of known root objects, like sysdict and mark all objects reachable from those (revealed by the tp_traverse method) as "alive". We know anything marked alive cannot be garbage and can be excluded from the regular cyclic GC process. For most programs, this saves a moderate amount of computation since the marking pass is relatively cheaper per object.

Ifgc.freeze() is used, it's unlikely that this marking phase will be a win since it's expected that the majority of objects will be frozen. Disable the marking phase if freeze is used.

Seegh-126491 for the non-free-threaded version of this technique.

pyperformanceresults vs merge base. I suspect the slowdown on some benchmarks is not real. For example, regex_v8 should not be slower.

Here are the pyperformance results for a bare-metal AMD Ryzen machine. It does not show a slowdown on regex_v8, for example.

To better show the expected improvement, I ran a "sphinx build" benchmark, like ingh-124567. Results are:

• Issue:Add marking phase to free-threaded cyclic GC #128807