From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-01-16T03:54:16+09:00
Subject: [OT] Re: memory usage question

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 03:33:35AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> In article <00d801c19def$cd7c3b20$5d091b18@austin.rr.com>,
> Hal E. Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Mark Hahn" <mchahn@facelink.com>
> >To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
> >Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 11:37 AM
> >Subject: memory usage question
> >
> >
> >> I need to write a script that will use a hash with 4 million strings of 16
> >> chars each.  As a test I wrote this quick script:
> >>
> >>   h = {}; s = 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'
> >>   for i in 1..4_000_000
> >>     h[i] = (s = s.succ)
> >>   end
> >>
> >> This ran relatively fast, but it consumed 265 megs of windows memory and
> >> failed with out of memory error at around 3 million elements.
> >>
> >> Why did Ruby fail at 265 megs and is there another way for me to do this?
> >
> >Four million strings, eh?  :)
> >
> ><oldtimer_rant>
> >Buncha young kids wanna allocate data structures with four million
> >items... in my day, we had 64K of RAM and part of that was the OS
> >and the runtime. The compiler wouldn't all fit in memory at once. It
> >was swapped out to this clunky external Shugart floppy disk drive
> >that would walk across the table if you didn't tape it down. It made a
> >noise like a boa constrictor gagging on a weasel. And the compiler
> >couldn't handle arrays bigger than a thousand elements.
> >And we LIKED IT...
> ></oldtimer_rant>
> 
> And in my day we had 16K of RAM and no Shugart floppy, we saved our 
> programs and data on casette tapes, believe it or not, and your program 
> loaded from tape at about 600 baud... But the worst part was that the 
> programs we wrote were in BASIC or machine code (not assembly, we're 
> talking typing in the Hex for he opcodes - we considered ourselves lucky 
> to not have to toggle our programs in with switches :).  Of course we 
> walked several miles to school in the snow, too.  Uphill both ways ;-) 
> 
> Phil
> 

Ahhh, That brings back the senior project for my Aerospace Engineering
degree.  I was manually swapping out computer fluid dynamics grids and
coeffecients to files as I completed calculations on them on my dos
based x86 with 4MB.  IIRC, the data for my entire grid was 800MB in
total...  I think running that for three or four days straight led to
the premature death of my hard drive in that machine...

-- alan

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com