Port update outdated problem.

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 20, 2014, at 5:47 AM, Clemens Lang wrote:

>>> That's on 10.6, where I have indeed seen clang-3.4 consume huge amounts of
>>> memory on a single file, AFAIK that compiler wasn't being used. However, if
>>> port upgrade outdated uses a single tclsh process for the whole procedure, and
>>> it's this process that handles (inefficient) db stuff, that could cause its
>>> memory footprint to explode.
> 
> Most of the stuff this tclsh process does is not written in a language that
> requires manual memory management. Tcl code doesn't leak memory.
> 
> 
>> It's certainly possible there is a memory leak in MacPorts base somewhere.
> 
> It's possible that there is a memory leak in the parts of MacPorts written in C. A lot
> of the code is old and hasn't seen maintenance or re-factoring in a while. I'm pretty
> confident the parts I've looked at (registry, darwintrace, tracelib and curl parts of
> pextlib) are leak-free, but that doesn't mean that other parts are.

Sure, I didn't necessarily mean a memory leak in the traditional C sense of a pointer that was allocated but not freed. But it's certainly possible to write code in an interpreted language like Tcl that uses a lot of memory, possibly unnecessarily. It's possible to write code that accumulates a vast quantity of information in a variable, perhaps a global variable, perhaps by appending to that variable and never clearing it. I don't truly understand how base works and fits together, and my feeling is few people do, or someone would have figured out the solution to weird bugs like https://trac.macports.org/ticket/37093 by now.