On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 10:49:28AM -0400, bulia byak wrote:
I tried this and never could really freeze it, though the memory was being eaten fast. In the past, I had similar lock-ups when all of the memory including virtual was eaten. According to Mental, this is how the garbage collector works - it does not release memory immediately. And indeed, I pushed memory consumption to 50% by stamping several hundred copies, then deleted them all (memory stayed at 50%), then did stumping again - and memory did not grow this time, i.e. the old memory was reused.
Between this and the other memory-related bug report (1116480) it seems to me that the GC likes to allocate about 400-500M worth of memory before it backs off. I've got 1G of memory in any of my machines, so I haven't run into the thrashing or freezes. It does, however, eat a LOT of memory fast (and then stops leaving me about 100M free -- the rest of my bloated system using the remaining 500M).