warner@s3dawn.ARPA (Ken Warner) (08/29/89)
Our news has been broken for over a week. Could someone send me all of comp.lang.smalltalk for the last 10 days? Earlier I posted a news-item describing image "bloat" in PPS-80 V2.3 on a Mac. I have found that much of the image "bloat" that I found was due to a flood of zombi-parasite objects, some of which were objects of obsolete classes, that would not respond to the release message and which the garbage collector thought were "ok." The only way I found to get rid of some of these objects was to remove the class definition from the system, then file it back in. Bazaar to say the least. Right now I have over 11,000 arrays instantiated in my image, yes over eleven-thousand. I know that I'm not using all of them but am reluctant to remove the Array class and who has time to examine each one to decide if it's a viable object? This is not good. I think that some sort of better garbage collecting scheme has to be implemented. Objects from obsolete classes shouldn't be allowed to accumulate. Clumps of objects that circularly refer to each other but that are not referenced from outside the clump should also be candidates. I am not a garbage collector whiz but it seems to me that the current system leaves much to be desired. Ken Warner warner@scubed.scubed