Tracking Memory Usage and Garbage Collection

Author: Misha v.3 [October 28, 2010]
Version: 1.5
Tags: Memory

Well, here we go... now we've even gotten to garbage collection... But then, who promised this would be completely easy? Anyway, using it isn't mandatory at all, but sometimes a moment arrives where it can come in handy. The built-in ^memory:compact[] hasn't gone anywhere, but calling it on every little thing isn't a great idea, since that operation isn't exactly fast.

And that's where the proposed Erusage.p class can help, its job is, in principle, exactly the same thing: periodic calls to ^memory:compact[], except it won't do this constantly. On top of that, it will also accumulate some simple statistics that might come in handy.

As usual, everything is simple: download the archive, unpack it, hook up Erusage.p in the root auto.p, and in the places where you feel garbage collection ought to happen, call ^Erusage:compact[] instead of the regular ^memory:compact[]. That's it. :)

And what does that give you? The thing is, the class will only call the parser's ^memory:compact[] when more memory than the value of $iLimit (2048 KB by default) has been used since the last garbage collection; otherwise nothing happens (other than counting the number of calls). You can change the value of $iLimit by calling the static method ^Erusage:init[$.iLimit(4096)].

If, at some point in your code's space-time continuum, you decide that a genuine, real ^memory:compact[] absolutely must run right there, go ahead and call ^Erusage:compact[$.bForce(1)] and it will be executed, no questions asked :)

And finally, in @postprocess[] you can call ^Erusage:print[] and print the accumulated results to the screen (or to a file, if you call ^Erusage:print[$.sFile[path/to/file.log]]).

You can also call ^Erusage:log[$.sFile[/path/to/erusage.log]] from @postprocess[], and the class will log the page-generation time and the memory used (plus a few other useful little details).

And now that's really everything :)

Download:

Erusage.zip (15.03.2009  1.4 KB)
Archive of the class.