Re: [Help-smalltalk] the garbage collector is not doing its job

[Paolo Bonzini]

Derek Zhou wrote:
> On Saturday 17 January 2009 01:21:00 pm Derek Zhou wrote:
>> So far the only ways I found to really reclaim memory are either
>> "ObjectMemory compact" or back to back "ObjectMemory globalGarbageCollect";
>> a
>> single "globalGarbageCollect" won't do. Right now I work around the problem
>> by sprinkle my code with "ObjectMemory compact" but that sounds silly,
>> isn't it?
> I debugged it a little and come up with a 2 lines patch that fix this memory 
> leak. The idea is to always finish the sweep before the compacting; Otherwise 
> you may be compacting a heap full of garbage. Worse, in my case I am 
> producing garbage faster than the incremental sweeping can get to them so my 
> heap just keep growing. Please apply.

The patch is good, thanks very much.

Paolo

> ly.
>  
> --- smalltalk-3.0.5/libgst/oop.c      2008-10-19 04:48:40.000000000 -0700
> +++ smalltalk-3.0.5_new/libgst/oop.c  2009-01-18 23:24:18.000000000 -0800
> @@ -808,6 +808,7 @@
>    if COMMON (p_instance)
>      goto ok;
>  
> +  _gst_finish_incremental_gc ();
>    _gst_compact (0);
>    p_instance = (gst_object) _gst_mem_alloc (_gst_mem.old, size);
>    if UNCOMMON (!p_instance)
> @@ -1125,6 +1126,7 @@
>           * 100.0 / old_limit > _gst_mem.grow_threshold_percent)
>          {
>            s = "done, heap compacted";
> +          _gst_finish_incremental_gc ();
>            _gst_compact (0);
>          }