[PD] Fwd: Variable number of objects?

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Fri Sep 30 18:01:39 CEST 2011


Le 2011-09-29 à 10:17:00, Jonathan Wilkes a écrit :

> Since you have a large patch, I'd be curious to know how much memory is 
> taken up by having the switched off voices just sitting there.

It's not easy to know how much memory is taken by a bunch of small 
mallocs. If you use getbytes() you have some idea of what's going on, but 
it doesn't count the malloc accounting info that only malloc()/free() 
usually know about, and it doesn't count the overallocation that malloc() 
might do in order to make its life easier and make gradual realloc() 
faster. Then it also doesn't count the overallocation of the memory zones 
so that brk() or mmap() or mremap() doesn't have to be called as often, 
which means that when you look at the process size in a process monitor 
(ps or top or other) the difference you might see will not be accurate at 
all... even if you manage to get it in bytes 4k-blocks instead of 
megabytes.

So, if you really want to know the memory usage for a certain part of pd, 
make sure that everything uses getbytes() instead of malloc()/new/etc, and 
then try to find a formula that can tell you how much extra you should 
count, and call it from getbytes() and freebytes() in order to keep 
accurate statistics.

E.g. I recall that will the Perl Allocator that was being used by Perl in 
the late 90's, you had to add sizeof(void*) to your byte request, and then 
round to the next power of two. From this info you can then write :

size_t real_size (size_t n) {return 1<<highest_bit(n+sizeof(void *));}

highest_bit is a function that finds the position of the highest «1» bit 
of an int. I have such a function in gridflow.h :

#define Z(N) if ((x>>N)&(((typeof(x))1<<N)-1)) { x>>=N; i+=N; }
static int highest_bit(uint32 x) {int i=0; Z(16)Z(8)Z(4)Z(2)Z(1)return i;}
#undef Z

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC


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