Re: not freeing swap disk

Scott Raney ((no email))
Thu, 16 Jun 94 22:22:10 MDT

>
> Hello,
>
> I'm finding that when I open stacks in Metacard it uses up part of my swap disk, but
> when I close them the swap disk is not freed up. After doing this a whole bunch
> of times my machine runs out of swap disk. This is not good!

If you set the Destroy Stack On Close property, MetaCaard will free up
the memory that stack is using when it is closed. Otherwise, it will
keep the stack around on the assumption that you'll need it again.

Note that this only helps if you close a stack before opening each new
one. If you open 5 stacks and then close them all (and they have the
destroy on close property set), the swap space used by these stacks
will not become available again, although the memory could be used to
open 5 other stacks. This is a common characteristic of UNIX
applications (unfortunately including most X servers): they grow to
meet the maximum memory need, but never shrink again when the peak has
passed. It's just a characteristic of the way the malloc() call is
implemented.

> Also, is there any way, when using the script editor, to go to a certain line
> or even find out what line you are on? How about printing script files?

These both sound like good DIY projects. Actually, I'm still waiting
for some bright person to implement replacing the script editor with
emacs. Now that you can address objects by referencing variables, it
wouldn't be that hard to do. You'd get all the fancy emacs features
like macros, search and replace, and an easy way to move handlers
between scripts.
Scott

-- 
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* Scott Raney  303-447-3936            Remember: the better you look, *
* raney@metacard.com                   the more you'll see -- Lidia   *
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