[Nickle]Nickle memory profiling

Michael Cahill nickle@nickle.org
Wed, 5 Jun 2002 17:14:09 +1000


I'm using nickle to investigate some factorization problems, and just
for fun tried to do the following:

	Miller_Rabin::primebits(100000, 20)

(i.e., try to generate a 100,000 bit prime).  I wasn't expecting this to
work (at least not any time soon), but I was surprised by what happened -
nickle ran for a while using a modest amount of RAM (about 10M), then
memory usage shot up until system memory was exhausted.

I turned on GCdebug to try to see whether memory use was linked to a
particular phase of the algorithm, or if a suspicious number of objects
of one size were being allocated, but it wasn't obvious.

So, does anyone have any recommendations for working out where in nickle
code the memory is being allocated?

Cheers,
Michael.