From: Wesley J Landaker <wjl@...>
Date: 2002-06-10T06:02:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Park and Sean....Possible memory bug in Ruby? I'm stumped!

On Sunday 09 June 2002 02:53 pm, Dossy wrote:

> On 2002.06.10, Wesley J Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net> wrote:
> > The first one creates a file object, does a read, then the file
> > object is floating. If and when it gets garbage collected, the file
> > will be closed. But if you run a ton of these commands in a row,
> > it's extremely easy to open more files than is allowed by the OS
> > before the garbage collector ever kicks in. (Perhaps ruby ought to
> > catch the error and run the garbage collector, then try again
> > transparently?)

> You know, this might be the problem I'm experiencing with DBI and
> dbd_oracle.
>
> I never execute StatementHandle#finish -- could I be running out of
> statement handles?  (Remember, when I explicitly added "GC.start"
> to my code, the crash went away.)
>
> Shouldn't DBI tell me I've run out of statement handles, rather than
> segfaulting Ruby?

I'm not real familiar with DBI and the dbd_oracle extension, but 
assuming it's using file descriptors for the statement handles (file 
descriptors are used for files, sockets, fifos, pipes, etc) the same 
sort of thing could be happening -- where you have sort of a race 
between your code and the garbage collector. =)

> Maybe I can create a reproducible test case now, if this is why it's
> dying ...

Good luck, it's a definate possibility. =)

-- 
Wesley J. Landaker - wjl@icecavern.net
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