Memory leak

I have a program running on a rPi, which periodically (after a week or so) silently quits. At that point any attempt to do anything with the desktop produces “There is not enough memory to create this menu or window” with the error box title Pinboard.

It requires a power cycle at that point.

Are there any suggestions where I should be looking?

Watch the Task Manager for a memory leak

Watch the Task Manager for a memory leak

I had that open on the desktop when it failed last time. The top part didn’t show any changes. I’ve now got a higher screen resolution so I can have more of it in view, as once the fault occurs I can’t scroll down it.

Notably the memory allocation of Pinboard didn’t change. That might mean that the tasks display couldn’t update after the problem, but there wasn’t anything I noticed creeping upwards. Free and Next didn’t change.

“There is not enough memory to create this menu or window”

Doesn’t that normally indicate RMA exhaustion?

Leave the Tasks window scrolled to the bottom so that you can read the “Module area” value. IIRC the maximum permitted is 256MB.

Doesn’t that normally indicate RMA exhaustion?

That’s what I hoped someone would tell me. Currently showing 13512K after 24 hours running.

JUst checked, as it’s several years since I wrote it. There’s no use of pollword-non-zero, so this isn’t allocating RMA for that purpose.

It is calling IIC_Control. It’s using an IIC-to-one-wire adapter to read an array of temperature sensors. I don’t know what that SWI does internally.

So now, after a day of running, the module area is over 150MB, and growing at 4K per second. How would I find out why?

Is ReportHeap from Reporter useful? Or perhaps Nemo’s !RMA https://sites.google.com/view/nemo20000/rma

!RMA shows a huge number of 128 byte blocks. The first address in those all contain 2001cb94. I can’t remember how to find out where that address is.
*memory seems to show it containing random bits of text.

I agree with Stuart, but although !RMA gives a good visual representation but does not lend itself to spotting changes.
I suggest writing a little Wimp program to run the following commands at intervals (eg 10 seconds) for a while…

   *ReportClear
   *ReportHeap L
   *ReportSave

That address is likely to be module related – have a gander at *Modules

That address is likely to be module related – have a gander at *Modules

Did that. It isn’t in any of them.

I suggest writing a little Wimp program to run

I’ll have a look at that later, though I’m going to have to change Reporter to save to disc, rather than ram disc, since the computer locks up totally when this problem runs to completion.

Incidentally !RMA downloads as an application. I did it first on Windows (where I use the forum) and it just got messy – all the filetypes were wrong, and I failed to guess all of them correctly, so it kept aborting. (!runimage was data, all the sprites were text, the help file was something odd, and the !run was a word document.)

I had to use Iris to download it – tricky in itself as it kept putting https:// in front of the URL I pasted in, which also contained https://.

Incidentally !RMA downloads as an application. I did it first on Windows (where I use the forum) and it just got messy – all the filetypes were wrong

It downloaded as a ZIP file here. One possibility is that the browser – or Windows itself – was “helpfully” unpacking the ZIP file for you (Safari on macOS has an option called “Open safe files after downloading” which does pretty much exactly what you described).

One possibility is that the browser – or Windows itself – was “helpfully” unpacking the ZIP file for you.

I was using Firefox on Windows 10.

Click on the link opens an “Extract” window, though the downloaded file is a zip. Right-click, and “save link as” allows direct saving of the Zip file. I must remember that for the future.

Firefox on Windows 11 here – downloads as a ZIP. Might have set to auto-open in Explorer?

Firefox is set to “always ask where to save”. It doesn’t ask, or not in this case at least. Instead it downloads, then opens an extract folder, from which I “saved” the file, as I expected to get a “save as” window.

I’ll have a look at that later

A good place to start would be !Reporter.Examples.Basic.HeapCheck – probably only needs the Clear and Save commands adding, and the interval time adjusting to suit. And maybe a limiting count to stop it after 10 or whatever.