Ditto. I think they like 'leak' because they have no decent tools (in too many cases, not all!) to diagnose it. I see teams do things like "Run this for a week and see if it runs out of memory", rather than "Run it for 1M iterations, measure memory before, during, and after". What, they think that after six days, it's going to say "Ooh, I think I'll use more memory all of a sudden"??? (Yes, that COULD conceivably happen, but a day/week/month/year/decade are almost equivalent if you have no clue what might cause it; if you declare victory after a week, it might have been *about* to occur...)
On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 5:25 PM, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > Gee, I agree with John. I must be having a mellow day. > > Seriously, I don't think "leak" absolves blame. If you had a water leak it > would definitely be a fault, not a "situation." "Leak" seems to perfectly > characterize what happens: the region has lots of free memory, the program > runs for a while, and now the free storage has mysteriously disappeared. > Where did it go? It leaked. > > The LE manuals use the term "storage leak problems." > > Of course, it's not really a storage or memory problem at all. It is a > "failure to free" error. Memory is fine; the problem is the absence of free > or delete instructions. Except for the fact that "memory leak" is an > established term that most folks agree on and recognize, I would support > the > terminology "failure to free" error. > > Charles > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of John Gilmore > Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 11:57 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: How diagnose potential memory leaks with LE? > > Barry Merrill wrote: > > <begin extract> > Is there really a reason to call a z/OS MEMORY ERROR a LEAK??? It's an > ERROR. I know the Open Systems guys love to hide behind words that make it > NOT seem to be their error, but why us??? > <end extract/> > > and I strongly agree that the use of euphemisms for what are in fact errors > is undesirable. > > In this case, however, the use of 'leak' instead of 'error' is a very old > practice. The phrase 'storage leak' has been used at least since the 1970s > to characterize situations in which dynamically allocated [usually] heap > storage is incompletely freed at the end of its use, so that the total > amount of this storage available gradually diminishes, leaks away, until > processing can no longer continue or performance deteriorates > spectacularly. > > Here, I think, some loss in precision would attend using a generic term > like > 'storage error' instead of the traditional one. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
