From: Stephen Kellett <snail@...>
Date: 2005-09-24T02:51:39+09:00
Subject: Re: memory measurements

In message <20050923164415.41137.qmail@web36114.mail.mud.yahoo.com>, 
Eric Mahurin <eric_mahurin@yahoo.com> writes
>I don't care about graphs and such.  Just a method (or several)
>in GC/ObjectSpace to get some memory info.  If the above did
>what I'm thinking about (walk through each
>object/stack/symbol-table/etc and add up the memory used), it
>would be portable,

If you examine the source for Ruby you'll find that the above is 
non-trivial and is implemented in C, in the form of the garbage 
collector. I have offered to write a C API to collect such stats (and 
will provide a simple Ruby API to provide other data to Ruby in the form 
of a snapshot) but have not yet had the time to do it. Is this portable? 
Yes if you regard compiling C on each platform to get the code working.

Someone else (sorry can't remember who) did write a Ruby snippet to walk 
the object space. The main problem with this approach and any approach 
that tries to trace ruby memory usage using say a set_trace_func() type 
approach is the act of sending data to the ruby callback or walking the 
object space in ruby allocates more objects, thus distorting the 
picture, sometimes quite badly.

>but you said it is windows only.

It is written in C++ and assembly. It is impossible to do low level 
hooking of the type required to write this software in anything other 
than similar languages. You could not write these software tools in 
Ruby, Python, Java, Lua, etc.

>Also, I
>couldn't find any download link.

I think I covered that when I wrote:

 >No website description at the present time but you can apply for the 
beta >at

Stephen
-- 
Stephen Kellett
Object Media Limited    http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/software.html
Computer Consultancy, Software Development
Windows C++, Java, Assembler, Performance Analysis, Troubleshooting