Re: How to collect as much as possible with collectgarbage() ?

[Ignacio Burgueño <ignaciob@...>]

Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> > IIRC the number of cycles necessary depends on the depth of the data
> > to collect. For example
> >   t={}
> >   t=nil
> > will require one cycle, while
> >   t = { t = { t = { t = { t = { t = {} } } } } }
> > will require 6 cycles.

Thanks Jerome, Roberto.

> Probably what is happening in that program is this: when Lua reads
> that huge string, an internal buffer grows to accomodate that string.
> After that, it takes some collections for the buffer to resize to
> a reasonable size again.


That would be the luaL_Buffer used in read_chars (@liolib.c), right?
I thought that since that structure is in C it wouldn't affect Lua's 
memory use (i.e, it would release its memory right away once it goes out 
of scope), but I see it uses the stack.

So, I'd have to take care of issuing enough collectgarbage's after 
reading large files or calling table.concat, right?

Regards,
Ignacio