Re: Memory allocation/deallocations in swarm -- lead to thrashing?

[Doug Donalson;]

Certainly the time series graphs (BLT) continue to take up more memory.
That is why you can zoom in at any point on the graph.  I dont know
if this can account for all the memory probs that you are seeing or not.

Cheers,

   D3

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On Mon, 19 Jan 1998 address@hidden wrote:

> Hi, again
> Now swarm-1.0.5 is released, I have a question about memory management
> in swarm.  Hopefully someone out there can help me on this issue and
> at the same time, I hope that I don't offend anyone with my question.
> BTW, I'm using swarm-1.0.2 now.
> 
> It seems that swarm applications seems to "eat-up" the main memory
> and the size of memory usage grows  monotonically. Not only my own  swarm 
> applications (well, I may still have hidden memory leak...) but also simple 
> applications such as heatbugs grow their memory consumptions. Since the
> pop. size in heatbugs is static, I am a bit puzzled of the "memory leak."
> If you haven't tried, run heatbugs in batchmode for a large 
> durations. Then check the memory usage by using the commands either 
> "ps u" or "ps m" (The command may slightly different for different OSs)
> You can see the amount of memory used by heatbugs grows slowly but steadily.
> 
> The same can be observed for mousetrap, hello-world, etc. applications.
> If a swarm application requires a large number of iteration, IMHO, even 
> without
> dynamic memory allocations in the application itself, the application will
> require more and more memory and eventually make the system "thrash."
> In fact, I was able to make my system of 128M memory thrash with modified
> mousetrap and other applications. The mousetrap is modified to run
> for a large iterations.
> 
> It seems that this "memory leak" comes from other than the application --
> i.e. from swarm libraries, or from other libraries such as tcl/tk, BLT.
> 
> Why is it like this? One reason, I can think of is that each time a 
> data element is produced, say for a graph, a corresponding new object is 
> created in the "graphSequence" -- allocating more memory for the application.
> However, that seems not the always the case. It seems that swarm applications
> without graphElement seem to "eat-up" the memory as well. Another possible
> reason could be that each "Activity" in swarm can cost some memory.
> 
> It is really a problem to me and possibly to others since most of my 
> simulation 
> require long long simulation. Has anyone encountered the similar phenomenon?
> Can anyone offer a solution or an explanation? If someone out there
> installed swarm-1.0.5, could you see if the newest version still does
> the same?
> 
> Thank you 
> 
> 
> ---
>                 Jae C. Oh
>               315 Alumni Hall
>               Department of Computer Science
>               The University of Pittsburgh
>               Pittsburgh, PA 15260
> 
>                 Office: 315AL 624-8456
>                 WWW - http://www.cs.pitt.edu:80/~joh/
> 
> 
> 
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