[erlang-questions] simple question about list memory consumption

[CGS]

Hi,

About the two lists you were speaking about (I suppose you were referring
to the output of lists:map/2 and lists:seq/2), the second is destroyed as
soon as lists:map/2 exits. So, there shouldn't be any overhead here. And,
yes, the memory consumption peaked at higher value, but stabilized itself
at the value I mentioned before.

On a 64-bits machine, 2 words = 16 B and 3 words = 24 B, so, my value of 21
B is exactly in between 2 and 3 words. I suppose you worked on 32-bits
machine or with half-world emulator and you got half of that value (or a
bit less if we are to consider that the shell is adding bigger overhead).

CGS




On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 7:22 AM, <ok@REDACTED> wrote:

> > 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.
>
>
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