From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2007-03-09T07:18:14+09:00
Subject: Re: You thoughts/philosphies on manual garbage collection

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, dkmd_nielsen wrote:

> 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

if you can fork - that's the best - then you just let each child's death clean
up that sub-segment of work's memory.

-a
-- 
be kind whenever possible... it is always possible.
- the dalai lama