From: Brett Simmers <bsimmers@...>
Date: 2007-07-04T05:19:24+09:00
Subject: Garbage Collection

I know that the garbage collector will start when more memory is needed, 
but will it also start after the program has been running for a long 
period of time?  I have a daemon written in Ruby that's been running for 
about 8 days now, and its memory usage has increased by about 1MB per 
day.  It's up to 39MB by now which isn't bad, but if this trend 
continues it could get ugly after a few weeks.  What I don't know is if 
it's actually using all that memory or if it just hasn't run the GC yet 
because the usage is still fairly low.  I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to 
test this by putting a few calls to GC.start in the code and restarting 
it, but I'd really like to avoid restarting it if possible.  Does anyone 
know which conditions will trigger the GC other than malloc failing? 

Brett