Garbage collection

leftler · 06-22-05, 06:38 AM

I am running a good number of mods that is constantantly gathering data, the problem is I have frequent garbage collection and it gives me a siginificant frame loss when it is happening, I have 2GB of ram on my computer so running out of memory is not a problem. how could I cange the value that Wow will do its garbage collection, I am assumeing it would just be some console command.

any ideas?

Gello · 06-22-05, 08:21 AM

Unfortunately I haven't found a way to set the garbage collection threshold in WoW.

At the character select screen is an AddOns button, within there's a field at the top to change addon memory from 32MB to something else. Tho it won't push out the garbage collection limit if the threshhold isn't based on max memory. Worth a shot.

Beladona · 06-22-05, 08:27 AM

make sure your paging file is set correctly too. GCthreshold may be take the paging file into account when determining limits. PF size should be something like 1.5x max system ram...

I have noticed a difference between no PF and a properly set PF...

Kaelten · 06-22-05, 08:30 AM

biggest thing I notice is that its about 7 to 8 megs over what ever the starting point is. at least on my machine.

Beladona · 06-22-05, 08:39 AM

there may be a problem elsewhere. I would look at the addons you have installed and maybe see if anyone else has experienced memory issues. Be aware that some addons use data in a bad way. Relinker is useful, but also notorious for bad data handling, because it actively caches ALL links found in chat into a global variable, so that you can recall it whenever you want. Over the course of several hours, depending on how many, and how frequent links are seen in your chat window, this variable can get HUGE. This is just one example. There may be other addons with similar features that "Sniff" for data and cache it...

The nice thing is that Blizzard is adding relinker functionality as default in the client, and it will be grabbing data from your itemcache instead of a global variable. More efficient because it is an actively cached file and not a script variable that can use valuable memory...

Kaelten · 06-22-05, 08:55 AM

ya, Memory efficancy is a tricky thing. I have a datacache built into KCET so that it doesn't call the same recursive function or nested loop when nothing could have changed yet. Trick to those is clearing them properly. I had a few issues related to that for sure. But as a result of this when you scroll it can run you several hundred k to a meg a second on memory useage. But its all garbage.

One of the big proplems is that everytime you set a local variable or things like that and your variable goes out of scope lua doesn't dealocate it right there. It just gets marked as garbage.

Also when you add/multi/subtract/pass/change or whatever a variable lua just grabs a new chunk of memory and discards the old one.