Presently, Sage has a significant memory leak issue: Uniqueness of parents is currently guaranteed by keeping them in memory permanently.This prevents many computational strategies that are otherwise perfectly legitimate, but require the construction of, for instance, many finite fields and/or polynomial rings. A lot of arithmetic geometric constructions fall in that category and current approaches to tackle noncommutative algebra do too. Every single time I have tried to use sage for some significant computation, this has prevented me from completing it.
There has been work on resolving this issue by replacing permanent storage by weak caching, so that parents can actually get delete; see tickets #715 and #11521, for instance. The code on these tickets is by now one of the most carefully reviewed (future) parts of sage. However, time and again, issues elsewhere crop up because there is broken code elsewhere that never got exercised because parents never got deleted, even though they should. We have been in shape a couple of times now, where all noticeable issues were resolved. However, the merger of *other* tickets brought to light even different issues, resulting in pulling #715 and #11521. If we ever want sage to be usable on a reasonable scale, parents need to be deleted every now and again. The basic design allows them to. It's just that there is a lot code in sage that breaks when that actually happens. Apparently, the normal ticket review and merger process is not suitable for a change that's so fundamental to sage's infrastructure, because it favours small-scale and superficial patches (and hence keeps moving the goal posts for infrastructure changes). Any ideas how to get this done? For me this is a must-have to consider sage as viable platform and I suspect I am not the only one for which it is. Cheers, Nils -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
