Re: Possible Memory Leak with stream-for-each

[Andy Wingo]

Hi Abhijeet,

On Fri 30 Jul 2010 02:38, Abhijeet More <address@hidden> writes:

> To debug this further are there any useful places in the
> stream-for-each implementation that I could do a gc-stats from? Or
> would we need to look at the C implementation?
>
> Can anyone suggest good starting points for this?

We started poking this a little at the GNU Hackers Meeting last
weekend. I say "we" but it was really Tibi (copied on the mail) who was
doing most of the work.

We printed out the object-address of the stream at the start of the
iteration, then ctrl-C'd in GDB somewhere in the middle. We then called
GC_print_heap_obj on that address and it printed as a two-word
object. We scm_display'd the address, and it was not a stream. (It was
used for something else.)

So, it's not the case that the beginning of the stream was being held on
to. Which is a bad thing -- it means that somehow something in the
middle was being held on to.

To really track this down we need a heap profiler. To make a heap
profiler, we need to hack libgc. libgc has some of the things we need
already, but some are only present in debug builds, which is
ridiculous -- one should always have the ability to profile the heap. We
need to figure out which value is being misidentified as a pointer to a
heap-allocated stream-pair.

That is my analysis anyway. The next step is to be able to expose the
back-pointer graph from libgc, and write analysis tools to figure out
which non-stream objects point to a stream.

Andy
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