Garbage collection (crashing on Windows)

[Richard Gaskin]

Ben Rubinstein wrote:

 > The real problem is that the script was written originally 13 years
 > ago, and the basic architecture was to load everything into large
 > global arrays for cleanliness. Over that period, the size of the data
 > has multiplied over the years by 1-2 orders of magnitude....

Just how big is the data you need to work with in RAM at any given time?


 > My two biggest problems are:
 >
 > - LC just in effect crashes/halts, rather than throwing an error so
 > the app could at least report the problem

The challenge with low-memory conditions are that if there isn't enough 
RAM to operate normally there may not be enough RAM to report that 
through normal error-handling mechanisms.

It would certainly be nice to have reliable out-of-memory reporting, but 
I've never seen in it any xTalk yet.


 > - as far as I can tell, when I empty globals etc the memory isn't
 > being recovered.  This is really the root of my problem.

At first glance that sounds like a bug.  If you can find a way to create 
a simple test case to demonstrate a global not freeing up RAM after 
being emptied I'll bet the team could fix it quickly.

Grasping at straws here, I wonder if introducing an idle after the 
emptying might help, e.g.:

   put empty into gSomeVar
   wait 0 with messages

That should normally surrender control to the OS event loop, and if 
that's needed to complete the clearing of the RAM you may have a 
workaround for now.

I'd still call it a workaround, though, since we can't expect newcomers 
to be able to guess about such things; ideally the engine would clear 
memory when we ask it to.

If "put empty..." doesn't work, I wonder if this might trigger something 
more complete:

   delete variable gSomeVar

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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