Re: Misunderstanding mem allocation and require files

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 09.10.2013 22:43 schröbte Geoff Smith:
> Hi

Hi!

>   language = nil   -- I was expecting this to free most of my memory
>
>   collectgarbage("collect")
>
> So that big table in the require file is likely not being freed totally by the garbage collection. I don't understand why that is happening
>
> Any thoughts or explanation would be appreciated

The value returned by a call to `require` is cached in the 
`package.loaded` table (or `debug.getregistry()._LOADED`, which is the 
same table), so that a second call to `require` doesn't have to load the 
Lua module again. You can do

    language = nil
    package.loaded.frenchBig = nil
    collectgarbage("collect")

if you really want to get rid of the frenchBig data. `dofile` doesn't do 
any caching, so

    dofile( assert( package.searchpath( "frenchBig", package.path ) ) )

would be an alternative to `require` if you don't want caching at all ...

> Thanks
>
> Geoff

HTH,
Philipp