[Aubit4gl-discuss] String memory allocation issue?

[Don A. <dam...@ni...>]

In the process of testing our existing applications on Aubit (both 0.49.51 
and 0.49.68), I have discovered what appears to be a memory allocation 
issue with one of our programs.  I have trimmed out all of the excess code 
to create a simplified standalone application that duplicates the problem. 
 This program will use all available system memory (including swap) before 
it finally stops.  As soon as the program stops, all memory is released. 
I'm doing my testing on White Box Enterprise Linux (equivalent to RHEL 
3.0) using Informix Client SDK 2.81UC1, with A4GL_LEXTYPE set to EC.

I was able to track the problem down to the "let xstr_field = " line.  If 
I comment it out, the program does not use excessive memory.  On my test 
box, I'm seeing about 60MB of additional memory allocated for every 1000 
times through the main loop.  Based on the math, it seems like every time 
the let statement is performed, another 2000 bytes is allocated.

On the bright side, I've got 931 other executables that seem to be working 
wonderfully, based on the testing I have performed so far!  That brings me 
to an unrelated question.  Our executables are currently compiled with 
I4GL 7.20 on SCO Unix.  They range in size from around 1MB to 4MB.  The 
same executables compiled on my test system range from 10KB to 10MB.  Any 
idea why there would be such a large difference in file sizes?  Our 
applications typically consist of a single .4gl file with a large library 
of functions that is linked in during compilation.  I'm not really 
concerned, since the overall size of everything balances out, but I am 
curious.

I look forward to any and all responses.  In the meantime, I'll go back to 
playing, oops, I mean testing.


main
   define counter        integer
   define i              integer
   define reclength      integer
   define xdata          char(2000)
   define xstr_field     char(2000)

   let xdata = "ABCDE|FGHIJ|JLMNO|PQRST|UVWXYZ"
   let reclength = length(xdata)

   for counter = 1 to 20000
      if not counter mod 1000 then
         error "Count: ", counter
         sleep 1
      end if
      initialize xstr_field to null

      for i = 1 to reclength
         let xstr_field = xstr_field[1,i], xdata[i]
      end for
   end for
end main