From: Jan Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2007-01-04T01:54:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Memory Leak Madness

On 1/3/07, Brandon Casci <brandon@loudcity.net> wrote:
> Here is what my daemon does....
> It has a couple threads, Thread1 one gets work, and Thread2 performs
> work
>
> Thread 1:
>
> -Thread1 gets rows from a database every N seconds
> -it builds a series of objects based on the database rows, and appends
> them to an array. They are called "work items". The array is protected
> by a mutex-sync because Thread2 picks items off of it.
> -it sleeps for a while then repeats the process
>
> Thread 2:
>
> - Thread two gets a "work item" from the above array. An item is
> "popped" off the array by calling .shift from within a mutex-sync block
> - Hpricot pulls information down from url's inside the "work item"
> - the information gets put put into hashes, which get dumped to disk via
> YAML::dump

Sometime ago there was a problem with Array#shift leaking memory.
The proposed solution that time was to replace push/shift pairs with
unshift/pop (i.e. entering the data in the opposite direction). I
think it should be fixed now, but I'm not sure (1.8.5-p0 had this bug,
maybe 1.8.5-p2 doesn't).