[DGD]Re: editor() and swapout() problems

[Mikael Lind]

On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, Felix A. Croes wrote:

> Mikael Lind <z94lind at mtek.chalmers.se> wrote:
> 
> > The first time any object on my mud calls editor() or swapout(), dgd
> > prints out a lot of lines of what seems to be debugging messages. They
> > look like: 
> >
> > FREE(000f122c/72), array.c line 1109:
> >  03 01 'd '. 00 0f '8 cc 04 01 00 03 00 00 00 05 03 01 'd '. 00 0f '8 ', 04 01
> > FREE(0010c644/48), array.c line 1109:
> >  03 01 'e 'r 00 0f 'R 80 04 01 00 05 00 00 00 07 03 01 'Y ': 00 0f '> 98 04 01
> > [...]
> 
> This is indeed a debug message, and there are two ways in which it
> can occur.  The first is when you have arrays or mappings with
> circular links in them, with the most simple case being:
> 
>     A = allocate(1); A[0] = A;
> 
> The circular reference may involve more than one array.  For example,
> B[0] may be A and A[0] may be B.  Alternatively, the messages may be
> caused not by a circular array reference, but by a memory leak in DGD.
> 
> The more telling FREE messages will be those which refer to strings,
> since they will contain (part of) the string involved.  In case of
> a memory leak, they will help track down the specific cause of the
> leak.  Partially as a result of these messages, DGD does not have
> any known memory leaks, so my guess is that in this case, there are
> circular array references involved.

Yes, I do have circular array references in my object daemon. I didn't
realize that this caused memory problems, although I probably should have
suspected it. I'll just recode the object daemon so that it no longer uses
circular references. 

> The messages are generated only when the kfun swapout() is called,
> or when DGD decides on its own to perform a swapout for housekeeping
> reasons.

Could the latter be the case when editor() causes the debug messages to be
shown? 

> [...]
>
> If you just want to be rid of the messages, compile array.c without
> defining the macro DEBUG.

I won't do that, but thanks a lot for the information. It was really 
helpful. :)

// Mikael

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