Bug #10244: Garbage Collector not being triggered

• Status: Third Party's Issue
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• ruby -v: ruby 2.1.2p95 (2014-05-08 revision 45877) [x86_64-linux]
• Backport: 2.0.0: UNKNOWN, 2.1: UNKNOWN

[michel.boaventura (Michel Boaventura)]

Hi all,

I'm trying to understand why this simple script doesn't trigger a single run of the GC and eats all memory:

require 'gdk3'

loop do
  Gdk::Pixbuf.new('foo.png')
end

Changing it just a little to print Ruby GC.stat[:count] shows a constant value always:

require 'gdk3'

i = 0
loop do
  i += 1
  Gdk::Pixbuf.new('foo.png')
  puts GC.stat[:count] if (i / 100).zero?
end

Moreover, if I manually run it, then the memory usage stays constant:

require 'gdk3'

loop do
  Gdk::Pixbuf.new('foo.png')
  GC.start
end

I understant that this is probably a gdk3 issue, but what is puzzling me is why GC isn't running automatically but if I start it manually everything works just fine.

Thank you!

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Status changed from Open to Third Party's Issue

Michel Boaventura wrote:

I'm trying to understand why this simple script doesn't trigger a single run of the GC and eats all memory:

require 'gdk3'

loop do
  Gdk::Pixbuf.new('foo.png')
end

Ruby doesn't know about memories malloced inside gdk library, so they can't trigger GC.

  puts GC.stat[:count] if (i / 100).zero?

You might want to write (i % 100)?

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

On 2014/09/16 11:35, Michel Boaventura wrote:

Ruby doesn't know about memories >malloced inside gdk library, so they >can't trigger GC.

But if ruby doesn't know about this allocations, how it can collect this memory if asked manually?

The object itself knows how to release the resources it acquired.