From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-10-11T23:43:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Possible memory leak in ruby-1.8.6-p110??

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> I haven't had a chance to narrow this down in enough detail yet, but 
> there may be a memory leak in ruby-1.8.6-p110. Specifically, what I'm 
> doing is
> 
> a. Gentoo Linux, amd64, gcc 4.2.1
> b. Compiling ruby-1.8.6-p110 with "-g -pg" (profiling and debugging 
> options)
> c. Compiling the latest Ruby 1.9 from svn with full optimization 
> (-march=athlon64, -O3)
> d. Running the built-in benchmark suite of Ruby 1.9 with the Ruby from 
> step b. as the "matz" Ruby and the Ruby 1.9 from step c. as the Ruby 1.9
> 
> When it gets to the "bm_loop_generate" benchmark, it hangs up in the 
> 1.8.6 run, and the Ruby interpreter grows arbitrarily large -- I killed 
> it at 3 GB on my 4 GB machine.
> 
> I'm going to do some more digging before I file a bug report, but I'm 
> wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this. I'm in the process 
> of running the same scenario on a 32-bit system, so I haven't ruled in 
> or out 64-bit, gcc, etc. at this point.
> 
> 

Latest research:

1. It works fine on 32-bit.
2. It works fine on 64-bit with debugging plus profiling *plus 
optimization* (-g -pg -march=athlon64 -O3)
3. So far the *only* failure mode is 64-bit with "-g -pg" only.

So ... I'm going to call it a gcc (or gcc-gprof interface) problem and 
move on. :)