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

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "JOH" == joh  <address@hidden> writes:

JOH> but also simple applications such as heatbugs grow their
JOH> memory consumptions. Since the pop. size in heatbugs is static, I
JOH> am a bit puzzled of the "memory leak."  If you haven't tried, run
JOH> heatbugs in batchmode for a large durations. Then check the
JOH> memory usage by using the commands either "ps u" or "ps m" (The
JOH> command may slightly different for different OSs) You can see the
JOH> amount of memory used by heatbugs grows slowly but steadily.

How many iterations?  How big?  I don't see anything startling happen
with heatbugs after 50000 iterations (5 meg).

But it is entirely possible there are memory leaks in Swarm.  That's
just what we have to fight with for using a implementation language
without garbage collection!

Incidentally, within the GNU Objective C runtime, there are hooks
for replacing malloc, free, etc. with versions that do conservative 
garbage collection, canonically the Boehm collector:

ttp://reality.sgi.com/employees/boehm_mti/gc.html

So supposing you had a simulation that ran with the Boehm collector
with a virtual memory footprint consistently lower than without it,
that would suggest a memory leak in Swarm or one of the supporting
libraries.


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