[erlang-questions] simple question about list memory consumption

[ok@REDACTED]

> Hm, ignore my previous answer, then; I was under the impression that
> small enough integers would be stored as immediates in the
> list cell...

They are.
See the Efficiency guide.
http://www.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/advanced.html#id68680
"String ... 2 words per character"

Each list cell holds one integer, which *is* an immediate in the
list cell and points nowhere else, and one pointer to the next
element in the list.



>> 2. opening an Erlang shell (few MB consumption - stable);
>> 3. executing:
>>
>>
>> L = lists:map(fun(_) -> 107 end,lists:seq(1,10000000)), ok.

Two things strike me about this.
(A) you construct TWO lists here, so at 8 bytes per list cell
on a 32-bit machine, there's 16 bytes each already.
(B) You are doing this in the shell, where expressions are
interpreted.  I have no idea what space overheads that adds.

Is there a way of measuring the amount of heap space currently
_used_ in a process?  process_info>heap_size and
process_info>total_heap_size seem to be about the amount of
space allocated for a process, including its stack and any quantity
of free space.  So the following only gave me an approximate idea:

-module(ss).
-export([ss/1]).

heap_size() ->
    erlang:garbage_collect(),
    element(2, process_info(self(), heap_size)).

ss(N) ->
    Before = heap_size(),
    Result = loop(N),
    After  = heap_size(),
    (After-Before)*1.0 / length(Result).

loop(0) ->
    [];
loop(N) ->
    [$k | loop(N-1)].


However, the idea it _did_ give me was "between 2 and 3 words
per character", so it looks like "2 words per character" as
stated in the Efficiency Guide is, after all, true.

It's certainly nowhere near 21 bytes.