RE: Memory usage

Perhaps Calabash is not releasing already processed documents when they
become out of scope? In the case of two nested for-each loops, results
of the inner iteration can often be discarded before the next iteration.
Perhaps this is not happening.

But the precise behavior depends on what exactly does the outer for-each
loop do with the results of the inner for-each loop. If it collects all
of the documents produced by the inner loop, you end up with a quadratic
number (number of directories times the number files in each directory)
of documents that will have to be represented in memory.

But I don't know Calabash internals, so I am just guessing here. One
option for you could be to split the single for-loop into multiple
loops, or to try to reduce the number of documents that you collect in
the loops. In some cases explicitly p:sink-ing the outputs might help.
Another thing that might sometimes help is to wrap some steps in a
wrapper (for instance, p:group) to make sure that the results of the
steps are in an explicit scope and therefore don't "leak" outside of the
scope - this technique can be used as a hint that XProc processors could
use to release data that is no longer needed from memory. But I am not
sure if Calabash does this.

Regards,
Vojtech

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xproc-dev-request@w3.org [mailto:xproc-dev-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of
> Nic Gibson
> Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 12:22 PM
> To: XProc Dev
> Subject: Memory usage
> 
> We're seeing an XProc script through Calabash that shows increasing
memory
> usage over time. I suspect that this is to be expected under the
circumstances
> but I wanted to check and see if anyone can suggest a mitigating
action.
> 
> The script takes and XML file containing (basically) a list of file
> URLs. Each of these URLs is a directory on the local filesystem. All
XML
> files in each directory are read using p:load then transformed using
> several XSLT pipelines. The whole script is basically two big nested
> p:for-each loops (one to read directories and a nested one to read
> and process the files found)
> 
> As this runs the memory usage goes up for each file loaded and,
eventually,
> the jvm kills the process with a heap exhaustion error.
> 
> I suspect that there is nothing in the script above that might
indicate
> to calabash that any file can be discarded so each one is held in
memory until
> the end of the script. Is that likely? I'm not exactly a skilled Java
> programmer so I'm not in a position to read the code.
> 
> Can anyone see any sensible approach that might allow us to run this
> script over several thousand XML file when it currently dies after
around
> nine?
> 
> cheers
> 
> nic
>

Received on Friday, 7 May 2010 10:45:06 UTC