Well, after announcing the tcl-coredumper extension for Tcl (also usable in AOLserver), I started reading the documentation for Google's perftools project which includes TCMalloc and a heap checker, heap profiler and CPU profiler. I was really excited about the idea of using TCMalloc and the heap profiler as another tool to track down memory usage and memory leaks within AOLserver ...
But, (there's always a "but",) it appears that TCMalloc is a wholesale-retail allocator just like our Zippy (aka Tcl's threaded memory allocator). In other words, it would seem that using TCMalloc won't offer us any performance increase over the current Tcl threaded memory allocator -- I'll have to experiment to see if this is true or not. There's a good chance that the Google guys implemented their allocator in a more clever fashion than the Tcl threaded memory allocator. Another downside is that the heap profiler's output doesn't seem to be thread-aware. Part of the trickyness of finding memory leaks in AOLserver is that there are often times when one thread will allocate memory while another one deallocates it -- this often looks like a "leak" since most leak detection tools don't track alloc/frees across threads. It's not immediately obvious to me if Google's heap checker has this same limitation or not. Anyhow, if folks are looking for something to play with, I invite you all to try out Google's perftools package and TCMalloc and do some tests with AOLserver. -- Dossy -- Dossy Shiobara mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Panoptic Computer Network web: http://www.panoptic.com/ "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70) -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
