From: dkmd_nielsen <donn@...>
Date: 2007-03-09T07:15:05+09:00
Subject: You thoughts/philosphies on manual garbage collection

The process that initiated my message earlier (about deleting array
elements) is a rather long running process of rebuilding and
reconfiguring parameter files.  There hundreds of files, each with as
many as 22,000 parameters to processed.  For example, four small test
files ran in about two minutes.  There is a ton of string manipulation
going on, which probably translated into lots of trailing string parts
and pointer laying around RAM...clogging it up.  I was thinking of
manually initiating garbage collection after every five or ten files
processed.  Is that a smart thing?

What are yours thoughts on manually initiated garbage collection?
What kinds of practices result in bits and pieces of objects and
pointers being left laying around in the ether of RAM?  Are there
tools that help see what happens to RAM while a process runs, like a
debugger does with variables?

Thanks for everything
dvn