[erlang-questions] simple question about list memory consumption

[Bob Ippolito]

http://www.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/advanced.html

The data structure you want for space efficiency is binary.

On Friday, July 6, 2012, CGS wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I am puzzled by a behavior I didn't expect, so, if anyone can help to
> understand it, I would appreciate.
>
> Let's consider a string of latin1 characters. When dumped to a file on a
> harddisk it occupies, as expected, 1 B per character. When loaded in a
> variable in Erlang shell, I get about 21 B per character (at least free is
> reporting that). Of course, it is hard to test on one character due to
> changing RAM consumption of other processes. So, my test case consisted in
> (I voided writing down and reading from a file in the test case):
> 1. stabilizing the environment (no other processes were started, but the
> OS ones and watching for the RAM consumption stabilization at the level of
> MB - give or take 1MB);
> 2. opening an Erlang shell (few MB consumption - stable);
> 3. executing:
>
> L = lists:map(fun(_) -> 107 end,lists:seq(1,10000000)), ok.
>
> where (I know it's obvious, but just for completeness):
> - 107 is representing "k" character;
> - the 'ok' atom at the end is for not writing the content of L in the
> shell;
> - the list [107,107,...] is equivalent to "kk..." string (which written in
> a plain text file it gives 1 B per character as it is expected).
>
> The occupied RAM jumped by 214-217 MB for 10^7 characters (at 10^6
> characters, I got 21 MB, so, it is related to the string length only),
> which gives about 21 B per character (one can compute within the errors the
> exact the size, but I took that value as the minimum possible).
>
> Erlang shell reports "Erlang R15B01 (erts-5.9.1) [source] [smp:4:4]
> [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [dtrace]".
>
> I know that this isn't a big problem, but I am missing something here for
> sure. Can anyone point what I am missing? Thank you in advance.
>
> Regards,
> CGS
>
>
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