Re: A possible sound loading bug

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

>   By the way, what exactly happens if I load a sound into a global  
> variable, play it, then re-define the global variable again to load  
> a different sound? Does it flush the old sound? Or does it stay in  
> memory? Becouse I now realize that using my current function, the  
> sound seems to stay in memory even after the scheduled function re- 
> iterates and changes what sound the variable corrosponds to. This  
> leads to a slow increase in memory use, about two megs per minute in  
> my case. Any way I can avoid this, other then pre-loading all the  
> sounds first in node.lua?

The sound stays in memory until Lua garbage-collects it. See the Lua  
manual for how to control garbage collection, if you need to.

Lua only sees a small structure for every sound object (44 bytes if I  
counted correctly), it doesn't know about the associated OpenAL and  
Vorbis data (including buffered audio data, which is the whole sound  
if it's shorter than 10 seconds, or two streaming buffers of 172 KB  
for longer ones), so total memory usage per sound object (and  
accordingly total memory reclamation when the object is collected) is  
higher than Lua thinks.

  -Christian