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Manila's memory leak

14 September 2004   

 

Manila's memory leak

Yesterday, at Marc Canter's London gig of his European tour, I failed to rebut, or answer a straight question from Marc, "how'd you deal with Manila's memory leak."

In truth, I hadn't prepared for such a painful question. Painful, in that the damn leak has been there so many years, and still not fixed. It's so old that I'd forgotten about it. Likewise, root bloat, has also been lived with and forgotten.

In essence, I deal with the memory leak by putting machines off line several times a day for a minute or so after 10,000 page builds. For root bloat, I compact roots once a day for about 7-8 minutes for a large and busy installation, about 3 minutes for my Government sites (luckily out of office hours) and about a minute for some smaller installations that I manage. A minute and a half for my own Radio installation, too.

Why do I still use it? I don't know better. I can throw UserTalk around, within minutes knocking up sophisticated tools, so fast it makes me chuckle. Writing code in an outliner is tidy and the debugger a joy, and there's so much code to look through for examples.

I'd hoped, that with new management hiring of a kernel whizz named 'Charlton' back in February, who contacted me regarding my offline woes, that they would have been fixed by now. I can only imagine, that Charlton either wanted too much money or said it couldn't be done.

8 months later, in London, in a room full of key developers, Manila, Radio, Frontier was shown to be a toy.

In a few days time, I'll have completed a review of Manila. I wanted this to be honest, but in my rough notes, I'd only included the lack of exciting development/developers, performance/scaling issues as points against. Now, I realise that I'll need to include, ye olde memory leak and root bloat directly as these are the root cause of the above symptoms. Not good. To tell potential customers of a four year old memory leak, they're going to ask, "if that's not been fixed, where's the product going?"

Frontier's being open sourced at the end of this month. But this won't mean the memory leak will be fixed, possibly ever.

Userland's two products Manila and Radio need good publicity, like any blog product, service. At the moment, they get near zero publicity. I've often wondered why? Now I think I see, perhaps the new management actually need to keep quiet. Certainly, they don't label their products: "WARNING: memory leakage and root bloat will cause your server to be offline for several minutes everyday. As a direct result, we'll not sell many products, and will not afford to keep the product regularly updated, nor will many developers stay around, those that do will be bitter, and the support lists will thusly be dictatorially moderated and eerily quiet."

 


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