OpenEuphoria

RE: 2.4 Official -- memory stuff

• Posted by Andy Serpa <ac at onehorseshy.com> Jul 08, 2003
• 495 views

> 
> I'll be interested to see Andy Serpa's latest program
> so I can compare it to his earlier one. Maybe there's
> a common ingredient that bogs down ME's heap manager.
> XP (with the same memory) is fine.
> 

I am busy for a day or two here.  I should have something on Wednesday 
or Thursday.  Maybe I can send you one of my actual programs but they 
have many dependencies in my personal library so I'll have to sort that 
out.

There are two common ingredigrents off the top of my head:

-- "something big" (over some unknown threshold) needs to be freed at 
some point
-- and then, new sequences need to be created, probably with at least 
some nesting or floating point numbers (or mixing of different types)

In all my programs where this occurs, there is some sort of 
transformation going on.  Sorting is fine, copying or building up 
sequences from existing elements is fine, etc.  And the slowness seems 
to be occuring in those parts of the program that are (re)allocating 
memory, i.e. making sequences (specifically, "growing" them as my 
algorithms cannot predict final size or shape needed at the beginning).  
All other operations are speedy as usual.  2.4 always starts out faster 
than the equivalent in 2.3, but 2.3 stays at a steady rate (after 1st 
iteration, which is slowest) while 2.4 gets somewhat slower every single 
iteration.  2.4 actually uses slightly LESS memory than 2.3 according to 
my RAM indicator, but it jumps up & down while 2.3/Watcom the free 
memory only goes down, never up until program exits.

With any luck, it is just some quirk that can be isolated and dealt 
with.  I seem to have an uncanny knack for uncovering these things...