Once upon a time I noticed the Racket web server has a thread that
calls collect-garbage periodically (e.g. every 5 minutes).
I've discovered I need to do the same, for any program that needs to
run for hours or days. Otherwise, the program eventually abends: Out
of memory. Sometimes with a "Racket virtual machine error" message.
This is my experience on both Windows 7 and on Linux, with Racket 5.0
and 5.1.1.
As a result the following has become a "magic spell" I now throw into
such programs:
;; Make a thread to do garbage collection every 5 minutes.
(thread
(lambda ()
(let loop ()
(sleep (* 5 60))
(collect-garbage)
(loop))))
It seems weird to have such a magic spell, and to know it only from
nosing around the web server source.
Instead, maybe the Racket runtime should do this automatically (at
least by default)? I think that's people would expect coming from some
other language environments with GC (at least it's what I expected).
Or, at least it would be documented that this is by-design (say for
performance reasons, or there's no reasonable default, or whatever),
and that people should use such a magic spell for long-running
systems?
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