Driver question

[Sean Hinde]

I just found that it apears to be related to the fact that I was calling the
routine from the shell. I guess the shell was holding onto results of old
function calls or some such thing. If I call this in another process it
works beautifully - even in a tight loop the binaries are cleared to refc 1
after 4 or 5 more calls.

Cheers,
Sean

> 
> Hi,
> 
> A further question about the suggestion below:
> 
> > Yes they do. They might be exactly what you need. The 
> driver binaries
> > are reference counted, and when you call driver_allocate_binary(),
> > refcnt is set to 1 (only the driver is holding the binary).
> > 
> > When you later call driver_output_binary(), refcnt is 
> > incremented to 2,
> > and note that the driver must not change the contents from 
> > now on, since
> > erlang processes now can see the data and depend on this. The driver
> > migth as well call driver_free_binary(), which just 
> decrements refcnt.
> > Only when refcnt decrements to 0, the binary is actually freed.
> > 
> > Every erlang process that now receives the binary will 
> > increment refcnt,
> > and when the binary is garbage collected and found to be 
> unused refcnt
> > is decremented and finaly freed by the last erlang processe 
> > that garbage
> > collects it.
> 
> I have played with this somewhat.. I allocate the binary in 
> the driver and send the result to erlang. The refc is now 2 
> (although it sometime goes to 3 for a short time?). I do not 
> free it at this time as I want to read the refc in a future 
> call to my driver and then if it is back to 1 I can free up a 
> whole load of other stuff as well as the binary.
> 
> I have a fixed size array of handles so it is possible for 
> them all to be used up in which case I return "congestion".
> 
> The behaviour I can't quite figure out though is that of 
> erlang:garbage_collect(). If I call this, the binaries are 
> not immediately reduced to refc = 1. It takes something like 
> 10 seconds before any of them are freed and then some appear 
> to never be freed.
> 
> My binaries are 2 octets long.
> 
> Any thoughts on the behaviour of the garbage collector in 
> this situation?
> 
> Thanks,
> Sean
> 



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