World: r3wp

b: reduce [path [()] 1] - isn't this a bug which should be put to 
RAMBO?

BTW, the purpose of the PATH function is unclear to me

I'm not sure if it's bug because it's really hard to guess what should 
PATH do :) It does not return any value, I don't know.

Hi Rebolek, 

that's unfair! PATH quite often returns an error about an "invalid 
path value: ...." ;-)

(I meant, it's unfair to say, that it does not return a value. About 
returning a value that's worth having ... well, that's another can 
of worms altogether ;-)

Ingo you're right :) 
So description of PATH should look like:

USAGE:
    PATH value selector

DESCRIPTION:
     Path selection. Returns error! or nothing.
     PATH is an action value.

ARGUMENTS:
     value -- (Type: any)
     selector -- (Type: any)

the only problem with this description is what is your "nothing"?

it think, that the bug is PATH being exposed

it would be nice to have a working PATH action though (not the current 
one which seems to be an internal thing)

speaking about VID memory leak. "but its some intermittent thing... 
like I said previously, I never got around to tracking it... I only 
know something within VID, especially when creating many stylesheets 
dynamically, eventually grows mem use a lot."

glayout, being a nested VID engine, will effectively call layout 
many times each one might have its own style word calls.

so if you specify many variations of button, for example, it seems 
like if the WHOLE stylesheet is saved separately. over and over.

closing and freeing (setting to none) all code-related references 
to the shown views never amounted to releasing the used up ram.

showing/closing the same windows over and over has even caused memory 
leaks for me.

Alright, these are serious issues, so I would like to set up a demo 
of this and try to isolate.

its not always obvious, but in larger apps (the likes of altme) there 
is a memory increase all the while you play around...

Can you write some quick code which shows the first idea.

I remember that I was able to get the same issues using only VID, 
so GLayout was not the source cause... it was only amplifying a VID/View 
bug.

I can understand it's harder to find bugs hiding out in larger apps.

How to track memory usage within rebol - probably stats...

yess. I will try to write up a very small and unsexy test... give 
me 5

Mmm.. stats is more featured than it used to be.

yes.

the GC in 1.3.2 was improved a lot.

there are MUCH less mem crashes then there used to be.

I think I'll try to make a forever loop and log stats to a file, 
then maybe graph the stats to see what happens towards the end.

(Providing I show any crashes this way).

I was able to allocate 1 million liquid nodes (~ 700MB worth of ram) 
and although the GC slows down a lot after 400MB, it does not crash, 
until  you start missing real RAM.

(its possible the 400MB GC slow-down is system specific, and people 
with newer/better machine with more ram will get the bottleneck further 
away.

Ok, but how does the stylize loop look ? For example:
	forever [
		stylize/master [button: button "hello"]
	]

I am doing something similar, but have not reproduced the actual 
leak yet.

I am hoping I'll find an example which will.

this *might* have been fixed in v1.3.2  although my tests are simple, 
no stylesheet creation is now leaking even one byte!

but the 30MB ram using vid script is nothing rare.

the leak (if still there) might be specific to one feature of vid, 
like the init block or feel, or whatever... I have no idea.

Can you show it easily on an older view ?

not anymore... I'm not setup for this anymore... unfortunately, I 
don't have a lot of time tonight... I have to test cheyenne and start 
putting my web site back online in order to get slim, glayout and 
liquid  "out in the open".

Ok, another time.

(and am still fiddling around with a cleaner http-post func)

but IIRC I can still see the mem leak in GLayout... so maybe another 
time I can look in my old dev backups and find a VID test I had done 
which re-created the leak.

(that's before devcon 2004)

One has to be careful reloading scripts in the same console multiple 
times as this will also eat up hundreds of MB's of memory. I'm sure 
that I'm doing something "wrong" in those scripts, but have no time 
to investigate what it is. I wanted to ask earlier on a memory usage 
group and that we don't have one. Wouldn't it be nice to get laid 
out what techniques are useful in order to converve memory? Maybe 
the experts can put in a word or two on that. View does indeed also 
eat lots of memory, as well as image creation with to-image.

I can see the page now: "Memory Conservation in Rebol"

see it? in your mind or what?

What, with the entire VID and port systems as counterexamples?

one quick memory saving trick... don't use view  ;-)

Works for me, most of the time. Most of what I do can be done in 
/Core, much of it in /Base.

unfortunately, most of what I do uses view  ;-)

same here, but I don't see the problem as often as with continuous 
reuse of scripts in the same console. they might be graphics related, 
but not necessarily View related.

Well you're graphics guys, while I mostly do file and data manipulation.