Any advice for GC/memory debugging

[Alan Knowles]

Unfortunatly Tango doesnt seem to install on freeBSD -
I just get:
make: don't know how to make aaA.o. Stop

I'm having a go adding the minimize code from tango to phobos - any 
thoughts on if it should work? - it takes forever to build on this 
freebsd box...

Regards
Alan



Sean Kelly wrote:
> Alan Knowles wrote:
>> Having fleshed out an SMTP server, I've now started testing it against 
>> a good load level.
>>
>> Apart from the various thread issues in phobos (getHostbyName is not 
>> thread safe etc./ using udns solved alot of this...) - my bigger worry 
>> is memory management.
>>
>> With GC enabled/or even disabled, the memory pool will rise to ~ 200Mb 
>> from the baseline of ~20K and run out of memory on the box it's 
>> running on. The test box we have peaks at about 30 concurrent 
>> connections/threads. - compiled using GDC (as it's FreeBSD)
>>
>>  From what i've seen, there is no real way to disable the Garbage 
>> collection, in terms of stopping it from managing the 
>> allocation/deallocation of memory? as it is too intertwined in the 
>> management of things like char[] etc..
>>
>> Has anyone found good ways to  analyze where the application may be 
>> leaking memory/allocating to much memory - hooks in the in/out 
>> properties of methods ?
> 
> With Tango you can attach a cleanupHandler and use it to dump info on 
> objects being collected.  I'm planning to add more debugging features as 
> well, but they aren't in yet.  However, on Tango I'd add some logging to 
> lib/gc/basic/gc.d and on Phobos I'd add it to internal/gc/gc.d.
> 
>> Is there any way to compact the memory, as the pool appears to jump 
>> quite dramatically from ~ 64k->100Mb->250Mb, even though it looks like 
>> the used pool is significantly smaller..
> 
> Tango offers a GC.minimize() routine that may help.  I believe the same 
> routine is in Phobos as well but it's not actually implemented.
> 
> 
> Sean