Memory problems

From: Sean Slattery <jslttery_at_GS148.SP.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 15:11:09 -0500

I'm running into a weird problem in 2.2 on sunos 4.1.3 and aix3.2.5 (however
I've only investigated it on aix).

I have a for-each loop which on each iteration, reads in data from a large
file into a hash table, then opens two input and one output file, and has a
nested do loop which iterates over all the lines in one of the files, does a
calculation of which the most involved bit is a call to expt with a flot and
an integer exponent, and then writes the result to the output file. At the end
of every iteration of the for-each loop the files are closed and it loops
again.

The major memory consumption should be by the hash table (c. 10,000 entries,
each key being a symbol and value is a float). At the end of each loop I do a
(gc-stat) followed by a (gc) followed by a (gc-stat). The figures there tell
me that memory management seems to be working ok - the first (gc-stat) says
something like 60,000 cells used, and after the (gc), it always returns to
about 24,300 or so. The first figure varies wildly, but the second always gets
back to 24,300 or so.

Fine, except that the actual memory usage of the STk process just increases
and increases and increases. I'm looking at it running at the moment and
although STk thinks it's only used 5 heaps, the process is using 82M of memory.

Anyone know where I might look for the memory leak?

S.
Received on Sun Dec 10 1995 - 21:13:04 CET