why does memory consumption keep growing?

[bartc]

On 06/10/2017 00:38, Stefan Ram wrote:
> "Fetchinson ." <fetchinson at googlemail.com> writes:
>> I have a rather simple program which cycles through a bunch of files,
>> does some operation on them, and then quits. There are 500 files
>> involved and each operation takes about 5-10 MB of memory. As you'll
>> see I tried to make every attempt at removing everything at the end of
>> each cycle so that memory consumption doesn't grow as the for loop
>> progresses, but it still does.
> 
>    "2x 8GB DIMM DDR3-1600" cost $95.99 according to a web page.
>    This might be in the order of magnitude of the hourly rate
>    of a freelancing programmer.

Brilliant. We can forget about freeing memory or garbage collection, 
just keep adding a 16GB bank of memory every few hours. It's cheaper 
that paying a programmer to write memory-efficient code or fixing the 
memory leak!

(That's assuming such a program will only run on the programmer's 
machine and not a million consumer machines who would also need to fork 
out for extra memory. Their salaries may not stretch as far.)

-- 
bartc