On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Justin Mason wrote: > hmm. I suspect it may be possible to avoid that though. it may > be the act of taking references to the data somewhere -- simply > accessing a hash shouldn't cause a refcount increment.
It will increment the hash's refcount. And if you iterate through the elements of the hash, you'll increment (then probably soon decrement) their reference counts. I don't think it's avoidable; I've run into similar problems before with other reference-counted systems. I'm not extremely familiar with SA's code, but I'd guess it has a big list of rules somewhere that it iterates through. That probably touches memory all over the place. Regards, David.
