Possible memory leak in gloss

[laith alissa]

Hi there,
I'm having a memory issue with gloss and I was directed to report it to the developers. I recently posted a question to SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13479126/how-do-i-stop-gloss-requiring-an-increasing-amount-of-memory#comment18448179_13479126

Somebody ran a profile which showed the memory leak was within gloss. If somebody picks this up could they keep me informed, I'm using gloss for my degree project and if I have to drop it I need to do so as soon as possible.

Thanks
Laith Alissa

[Thomas DuBuisson]

I saw your question and have only taken enough time to verify that I
can reproduce it on my machine. On my machine, the resulting program
grow in heap more slowly, perhaps 0.025 MB every 5 seconds, but it did
grow. I (who am not the developer) will take a closer look as time
allows.

With respect to your needs, would your use of gloss actually be so
long running that this memory use would become a problem? If not,
then there is no hurry. If so then I am intrigued (not that you need
to explain anything).

Cheers,
Thomas

> --
>
>

[laith alissa]

My project team are developing a Haskell RTS game (similar to Red Alert 2) for our university degree. Of course the memory leak in the example isn't particularly concerning, but I have to be sure that the bug won't become more severe when gloss is managing an environment with a large number of entities. I'll be doing some testing to make sure it won't be a problem, but I thought it bese to ask around the Haskell community to see if somebody knows what's happening. Thanks for your reply.

[Jon Cave]

On Wednesday, 21 November 2012 00:36:27 UTC, laith alissa wrote:

I'm having a memory issue with gloss and I was directed to report it to the developers. I recently posted a question to SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13479126/how-do-i-stop-gloss-requiring-an-increasing-amount-of-memory#comment18448179_13479126

Somebody ran a profile which showed the memory leak was within gloss.

Looking at the graph linked in the SO comment I noticed that State is taking up a lot of memory. In Graphics.Gloss.Internals.Interface.Animate.Timing, the State IORef is read a number of times via getsIORef. I switched from multiple getsIORef calls to one readIORef and then using the functions on the returned value, i.e.

    state <- readIORef stateRef

    let displayTimeLast = stateDisplayTime state

    -- ...

    let animate = stateAnimate state

    -- ...

This change approximately halved memory usage over a 60 second test run.

Unfortunately there is still a steady increase in memory. It looks like there's something else causing problems in Graphics.Gloss.Internals.Interface.Animate.Timing, see the second and third items in the graph posted by hammar on SO.

Jon

[Christiaan Baaij]

Hi,

Which version of gloss are you using? And on what platform (OS & GHC version)?
Also, are you using the GLUT or the GLFW backend?
Does the heap-size also increase if you're displaying something other than text?
Say, a rotating square?

Cheers,

Christiaan

> --
>
>

[Ben Lippmeier]

On 22/11/2012, at 3:17 AM, laith alissa wrote:

> My project team are developing a Haskell RTS game (similar to Red Alert 2) for our university degree. Of course the memory leak in the example isn't particularly concerning, but I have to be sure that the bug won't become more severe when gloss is managing an environment with a large number of entities. I'll be doing some testing to make sure it won't be a problem, but I thought it bese to ask around the Haskell community to see if somebody knows what's happening.

Thanks, I fixed this in gloss-1.7.7.1. It was a typical laziness-induced space leak in the code that manages the frame timing for animations.

The program on SO now runs in constant space.

Ben.