Re: GC and continuations

[Michael Livshin <mlivshin at bigfoot dot com>]

Janis Dzerins <jonis@mt.lv> writes:

> On 17 Feb 2000, Ole Myren Rohne wrote:
> 
> >Janis Dzerins <jonis@mt.lv> writes:
> >
> >> When I stopped the process (ctrl-c) and run GC like this: (gc) then
> >> no memory was reclaimed (at least it was not abvious in the `top').
> >
> >Try (gc-stats). Garbage collection and malloc/free are not necessarily
> >correlated.
> 
> But the fact stays the same --- when guile accumulates for example 40M, it
> stays that big forever (I supose; that was my question).

try it with any C program: malloc n big blocks; see what top tells
you; then free them and see what top tells you again.  most probably
(there may be exceptions, though I'm not aware of any) you'll see the
same figure.

Guile grabs memory with malloc, and free doesn't usually returns the
memory to the OS.

[ note that changing the Guile allocator to use mmap or brk could be a 
  worthwhile project.  apart from the possibility to return the memory 
  to the OS (which I personally think is not very important), you'd
  also get much better control over alignment, etc. ]

> jonis

--mike

-- 
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

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