Mnesia, table updates, and (UNIX) process bloat

[Mickael Remond]

Hello Scott,

* Scott Lystig Fritchie <fritchie@REDACTED> [2006-04-06 03:00:26 -0500]:

> This smells like fragmentation of malloc's heap.  #1 is documented (I
> forget where, at the moment) to avoid/slow fragmentation for some
> kinds of ETS workloads.  Too bad it doesn't work for me.  Trying the
> "address order best fit" scheme didn't help, nor #3 or #4.
> 
> Is there a silver bullet for this particular problem, or am I
> sentenced to go spelunking with the "instrument" module and/or
> valgrind's "memcheck" and/or ....

Good description of the problem.
We are working on exactly the same problem, but we did not found any
answer to this problem yet. We are interested in experience  exchange
regarding the instrumentation analysis.

For now, we did not find a good way to avoid this fragmentation, which
is causing a loss of memory use. It is not technically speaking a memory
leak, but behave like a memory leak and, as a consequence memory
occupation keeps on growing indefinitely.

Memory fragmentation and how to avoid it is definitely a hard problem.

-- 
Mickaël Rémond
 http://www.process-one.net/