Re: help wanted diagnosing out-of-memory error

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

My guess as to the cause (based in part on what I know of the  
internals and based even more so on the diagnoses from others on this  
thread):

Lots of memory use initially means that it takes a while before the GC  
kicks in...

So all of those temporary strings aren't getting collected promptly...

So the string hash table is getting really big...

...and things error out when it tries to grow.

The problem that can be fixed in pure Lua is adjusting the GC threshold.

If you were prepared to write C code, it seems like adding a writef  
method to the io code that mirrored the implementation of  
string.format but did not intern the result would help.

Mark