[fpc-pascal]Memory Usage

[James Mills]

On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 09:47:07AM +0200, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> > I'd like to know why one of my programs pircsrv written in FPC uses up so
> > much memory. 107Mb of virtual memory (so it seems) and 7Mb of data. Here
> > is the top stats...
> 
> Two possibilities:
> - memory leaks.  Proceed as Peter already explained.
But a 100Mb odd memory leak ? How is this possible, my program only has
a handlefull of getMem and reAllocMem calls throughout it.


> - heap fragmentation. Use unit cmem, or if you use a lot of small same
> 	size reallocations, pool them and reuse (often even faster)
> 
> The second needs some explaining. The default FPC heapmanager never releases
> memory back to the system. Of course it tries to reuse the memory if
> possible, but sometimes with weird allocation schemes this can lead to a
> race in long running programs. (like daemons)

Not releasing memory back to the system, isn't this bad ?

James

> 
> All this is because of performance reasons. Memory allocation is close to
> being the slowest thing a program can do itself (calling the OS is of course
> slower).
>  
> The cmem unit links in libc, and uses the C primary memory allocations
> routines. Note that if you use libc anyway for some reason, it will also avoid
> having two heaps. (a libc and a fpc-rtl one)
> 
> The libc memory manager is much slower, but has less problems with strange
> memory allocation patterns. It is also probably a bit more secure.
> 
> In general keep using the FPC memory manager, unless this kind of behaviour
> happens (usually only in daemon programs that allocate/deallocate memory all
> the time), and then either switch to libc, or try to fix the odd memory
> patterns. (e.g. by pooling)
> 
> 
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