On Thursday, 28 December 2006 at 15:37, Troman wrote: > The issue of MALLOC was already raised in some of the previous > messages, and there seems to be something wrong with those MALLOC/FREE > macros. I noticed a memory leak in the scripting engine, to find out > what is actually causing it I set up a (script) loop with 10k > iterations with nothing but a string assignment in the loop body. > > Due to the nature of this loop the interpreter was pushing > string/non-string data to the stack interchangeably, hence > allocation/deallocationg memory for strings. The memory usage went up > by ~3mb after each 10k iterations. I couldn't stumble upon any flaws > in the code, looks like MALLOC/FREE are causing this. Anyway, after > replacng MALLOC/FREE with malloc/free the memory leak is gone. > > Apart from that I noticed WZ memory usage is increasing by about 35 mb > each time a skirmish game is restarted, it wouldn't surprise me if it > was due to MALLOC/FREE anomalies. Do we actually have to rely on > those two, ar would it make sense to simply replace them with > malloc/free? I remember someone (I think Per) was trying to rewrite > some functionality that dealt with wz memory usage that turned out to > be a non-trivial task, I hope it is not related to MALLOC/FREE.
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/warzone-dev/2005-September/000538.html Is that what you meant? There were no actual problems mentioned. A memory pool system has a few advantages: It's faster (ideally), it prevents memory fragmentation (the underlying OS might try to do that as well), and it can have some debugging functionality. Debugging could be done by external tools like valgrind (though valgrind is sloooow). Fragmentation is more a theoretical problem, and speed... well, malloc is probably faster than a bad memory pool system. We could replace MALLOC/FREE with a new (proven, so we need to find a working GPL implementation) memory pool system, but the only real advantage is built-in debugging, as long as we don't run lots of mallocs/frees per frame. So I guess just ripping out the current system (and leaving debugging to valgrind and other tools) and just using malloc/free is a good start. -- You can move the world with an idea, but you have to think of it first. _______________________________________________ Warzone-dev mailing list Warzone-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/warzone-dev
