Re: collectgarbage("count")

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2009/7/18 Peter Cawley <lua@corsix.org>:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 7:29 PM, František Fuka<fuka@fuxoft.cz> wrote:
>> collectgarbage("count") should return "the total memory in use by Lua (in
>> Kbytes)", which it does. But I am a little bit freaked out by the fact that
>> it returns values like "17.6513671875", e.g. with precision higher than
>> one-millionth of byte. Is this intentional and what exactly does it mean?
>
> It's a result of converting the number to decimal.
>
> 17.6513671875 does not mean 17 Kb and 651.36... bytes, it means 17 Kb
> and 65136/100000 of a Kb. However, as a Kb is 1024 bytes rather than
> 1000 bytes, a fraction Kb in base 10 will often look odd. If you
> multiply the value by 1024, you get the byte count, which is a whole
> number:
>
> 17.6513671875 * 1024 = 18075

IMHO it would feel more natural if the returned value was in kiB
rather than in kB. It would preserve byte precision for much bigger
values.