CODEWITHSUNDEEP
lua
Aarkan
Aarkan

Reputation: 4109

Run garbage collector

I have a number of Lua scripts running in mac Mac OS application along with Objective C code. The memory footprint of my application continues to rise over time. Therefore, I decided to call collectgarbage function periodically from my Lua script. Since, I am new to Lua, I am not sure if I should call it in every script or calling it from any of the script is fine i.e. does it collect the garbage from all open Lua states or just from the states associated with the current Lua file?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 5903

Answers (2)

Shashank
Shashank

Reputation: 13869

If you have access to all of your Lua states, you can use the lua_close function which collects all garbage from the Lua state that you pass to it as an argument.

void lua_close (lua_State *L);

This, however, frees all objects in the Lua state.

The other more reasonable alternative from the C API is the lua_gc method.

int lua_gc (lua_State *L, int what);

Either way you'll need to pass it a state, and the garbage collector will only clear the dynamic memory used by that specific state.

For more information, look up lua_close and lua_gc in the manual:

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html

Upvotes: 0

Nicol Bolas
Nicol Bolas

Reputation: 473537

Memory, like everything in Lua, is per-Lua state. Different Lua states are completely separate, and there is no (direct) way for anything done in one Lua state to affect the contents of another.

Also, Lua doesn't really know what a "script" is. Or a file. There's just the code the interpreter happens to be currently executing. It certainly does not keep track of memory on a per-"script" basis.

collectgarbage therefore works on the level that it can: it collects garbage from the current Lua state.

Upvotes: 2

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