From: Jeremy Bopp <jeremy@...>
Date: 2010-12-11T01:00:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Manual Memory Management and Automatic Garbage Collection

On 12/10/2010 09:37 AM, Tridib Bandopadhyay wrote:
> I can see the garbage collector coming when I type.
> 
> ./ruby -e 'GC.start()'
> 
> But I want to know while a code is running the printf statement written 
> by me should appear.
> 
> Is there any other code to make gc show my message.
> 
> This code is running for infinite time..but not showing the message.
> 
> 
> i=1
> while (true)
>    puts "message #{i}"
>    i+=1
> end
> 
> What are the other ways?
> 
> I need to convince myself that when there is memory allocation the 
> Garbage collector comes for cleaning with a printf statement stating its 
> work.

Maybe there are optimizations for String objects that circumvent parts
of regular garbage collection.  Have you tried looking at the memory
consumption of your ruby process as you run the while loop?  Is memory
usage growing over time, or does it plateau at some point?

Try using your ruby executable to run some non-trivial projects
available online.  Once you find one that triggers garbage collection
the way you want it, you could try to boil that down to something more
concise.

Another suggestion would be to pick up a template library such as erb
and use that to process some large template files with random data
repeatedly.  That should hopefully cause some memory growth with
something more than simple strings.

-Jeremy