From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-08-29T10:26:17+09:00
Subject: Re: So you want to make Ruby leak memory? Here's a simple way....

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Rob Sanheim wrote:

> Wow...that seems to be a pretty major leak to have made it this long
> w/o being noticed.  Maybe that type of behavior isn't repeated often
> enough in most programs to expose the leak?

It's a small enough leak that it takes a lot of iterations to start to add 
up.  And while the threshold of pain involved in chasing that thing down 
wasn't horrible, it's high enough that I can understand people doing what 
I have done for a long time:

Oh, that process is getting a bit big. 
*kill*  *restart*

Or they assume that it's a bug in their code somewhere and do the same 
thing.

Look at the discussion about Mutex leaking last week.

BTW, my test code makes use of a number of mutexes and heavy use of 
threading, and after running 120k hits through it, the RAM usage is rock 
solid at 13.8Mb.  Normally after that many hits it would have grown to 
around 45mb.  So, this is very pleasing to me.


Kirk Haines