On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, james murray wrote:
It steadily creeps up in memory used until I have approx 140 mb of free
memory on the computer. And although I noticed that it occasionally
flashed all the way down to only 6 - 9 MB of free memory at some points
for a flickering moment, when it finally crashed it was listing free
memory at around 133 mb. It took almost two hours for this to occur.
This is a kind of bug called a Memory Leak. Look for those words, to find
a tool that can look for those bugs. I don't know about OSX. I'd use
Valgrind but I'm on Linux.
The direct cause of the crash looks definitely like a mishandling of
an Out-of-Memory situation, but everybody would agree that the solution
to that is to fix the leak and not to improve the Out-of-Memory handler...
When I didn't have Valgrind, I used to measure the memory usage over a
long time, use it to figure out how much memory was lost per video frame,
and use that information as a hint. But the hint can only be used by
someone who has had a good overview of the program's code. It should also
be noted that the amount lost will be a little bigger than the size of the
offending allocation, as malloc needs some space for its own
administration... (typically 4-16 bytes more per malloc call)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
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