Re: Memory usage of GNUstep processes

[Robert J. Slover]

>From: =?ISO8859-1?Q?Andreas_H=F6schler?= <ahoesch@smartsoft.de>
>Date: 2007/12/14 Fri AM 09:55:26 CST
>To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
>Subject: Memory usage of GNUstep processes

>Hi all,
>
>I have a general memory usage question regarding GNUstep applications. 
>My app allows users to fetch objects from a database. The fetched raw 
>data is converted to Objective-C objects in memory. These objects are 
>held in a dic. As the user continues to do fetches the memory usages of 
>the process goes up:
>
>prstat
>    PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
>  27357 paravici  423M  414M sleep   59    0   0:36:36 0.6% SmartClient/1
>...
>
>So far that is what I would expect. However, if the user closes the 
>form the dic and all the Objective-C objects are released. I would 
>expect memory usage to go down to 100M or so but it stays at 423M. I 
>have made sure that dealloc on the objects is called.
>
>Shouldn't the process return memory to the operation system so that we 
>see decreased figures in prstat? I am seeing this on Solaris 10. I have 
>no idea whether this is Solaris or GNustep related or a general memory 
>management issue under Unix operating systems.
>
>Thanks for you hints!
>
>   Andreas
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Discuss-gnustep mailing list
>Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
>http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep


>From the malloc (3c) man page on Solaris, second paragraph of the description:

"After free() is executed, this space is made available for further allocation 
by the application, though not returned to the system. Memory is returned to 
the system only upon termination of the application."

HTH

--Robert