Re: [Playerstage-developers] Freeing client queues, to be or not to be

[Geoffrey B. <g....@au...>]

I vote for option 2. Leaks are bad, even small ones, and it's a small, 
one--time change to the API.

Geoff

Toby Collett wrote:
> Hi,
> I think the time has come to decide what we are going to do about the 
> minor memory leak when clients disconnect (i.e. we are unable to free 
> their queue as messages throughout various drivers may still point to it).
> 
> The way I see it we have a couple of options...
> 1) Ignore it, its not really an issue, its a small leak and  only when a 
> client disconnects...
> 2) Apply the autopointer patch I made a while back, this fixes the issue 
> but changes the function signature of ProcessMessage and some Publish 
> calls. These are trivial to update but affect every driver ever written.
> 3) come up with some other sort of reference counting for the client 
> queue itself and check the list of
> closed queue every so often till we are sure they are free and then 
> delete them. This is a bit painful, and I'm not even sure its 100% 
> possible until someone actually tries to implement it
> 4) Something I haven't thought of
> 
> Personally Im in favour of option 2, just because I dont like the idea 
> of a leak and if we are going to break the API there is no time like the 
> present. 2.0.x will still remain safe and we can provide an automatic 
> script for the 2.0 to 2.1 update (not that it is written yet...)
> 
> However I understand if people prefer option 1, I just think we should 
> decide this one once and for all.
> 
> Toby


-- 
Robotics research group, University of Auckland
http://www.ece.auckland.ac.nz/~gbig005/