Re: Memory woes

["Research" <research@...>]

Thanks everybody for your replies...

> > As there are, as far as I know, no memory leaks in Lua, I would look
> > at your memory manager for leaks.
>
> I agree with Edgar on the "no memory leaks in Lua" part.  Here are
> just some random remarks, based on your observations:

This is good to know. I was also refering to "soft" leaks like when symbols 
don't get collected for whatever reason.

> 1.  It can take two subsequent gc cycles to collect everything.  This
> one is easy to check by doing a double gc when you start/quit your
> game.

I wondered about this. We have put in 2 gcs and will see if the behaivor 
changes.

> 2.  If you have a stable life time cycle of objects, then Lua should
> *not* report "a few KB" increase between runs (I gather your obtain
> this via gcinfo), it should report the exact same amount.  The GC in
> Lua 5.0 runs atomically and is completely deterministic.  Realloc-ing
> to 0 (zero) as Edgar suggested cannot cause this increase.

I thought so too. Good to know it shouldn't.

> 4.  There *is* a way to create uncollectable cycles in Lua: if (k, v)
> is a key value pair in a weak valued table and v refers (directly or
> indirectly) back to k then that pair will never be removed from the
> table, even if v is the *only* reference to k.
> Correction: this holds for *weak keyed tables* and not (as stated) for
> *weak valued tables*.

This is interesting. Is this the _only_ way to create uncollectable items? 
Are there others?

Thanks!