[Mono-devel-list] (no subject)

[David Sheldon]

Hi, I have been running some tests that involve reading a lot of files
and processing them one by one. 

My code was something like this:

try {
  XmlValidatingReader xvr = new XmlValidatingReader (new XmlTextReader(filename));
  while(!xvr.EOF) 
    xvr.Read();
  xvr.Close();
} 
catch (XmlSchemaException ex) {
  // print error
}

Being a sort of lazy programmer, I didn't close the reader in a finally
block. Well, I couldn't really, as it was out of scope there, so I left
the scoping to deal with closing it.

A lot of these files failed for some reason, and I ended up getting
  "Unhandled Exception: System.IO.IOException: Win32 IO returned
   ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES."

Which surprised me as I didn't expect a Win32 IO error on linux, but
basically it meant that I had run out of per-user file handles (limited
to about 2000 under my install).

So what had happened was that there were a whole load of out-of-scope
objects using up these resources. 

Would it be possible for a garbage collect to be forced when we run out
of other resources like this, not just ram, to possibly free some up?

David

A simple example case - pass it the name of an existing file :

using System.IO;

class OpenTest 
{
  static void Main(string [] args )
  {
    for (int i = 0; i<20000;i++) {
      TextReader r = new StreamReader(args[0]);
    }      
  }
} 


-- 
"Not *the* Jane Harrington? Jane 'bury me in a Y-shaped coffin' Harrington?"
                        -- Edmund Blackadder.