On Mar 24, 2007, at 17:41 , Tim Johnson wrote:
On Mar 24, 2007, at 3:45 AM, Kyle Hamilton wrote:
The underlying OS has only a certain number of file handles that it
can maintain open at a time. On UNIX-like systems, there is also
possibly a maximum number of files per process. If this limit is
hit,
then no additional files can be opened, and on any attempt to do
so an
error is returned.
For some reason I was confused and thought that Squeak's garbage
collector would somehow make me immune from this. Like when the
file was no longer being used, it would be closed and purged.
Actually it is indeed. We use finalization for this [*]. However, you
cannot know _when_ an object actually will be finalized, so you may
be eating up handles nontheless.
Now I know otherwise :)
It's good practice not to rely on finalization, but treat it as a
safety net.
- Bert -
[*] See for example
http://www.mail-archive.com/beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org/
msg01719.html
or
http://www.google.com/search?q=squeak+finalization
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