Garbage Collection

I use CasualConc regularly to look up how certain words are used in a context. When I was using it, I realized CasualConc is a memory hog. I knew Word List, espcially when used for n-gram list, needs a lot of memory to process because it keeps counting new ones while it stores counted ones (not exactly, though). I knew Ruby has garbage collection built in, but it seemed like it wasn't working when I wated it to work (maybe because there still was a lot of unused memory). So I decided to force GC to start at some points (GC.start).

But when?

I've been trying several differnt points per each tool and associated method and monitor the differences. But because I've never seriously studied programming (I'm not and have never been in computer science), I don't think I understand how GC works (or in fact, I'm still not sure what exactly OO language entails. If you are breave enough to take a look at the Ruby/RubyCocoa source code of CasualConc, you can see my scripts are not written in Ruby way. I hope I have some time to learn to program a little more seriously someday, but for now, CasualConc works ok (at least for me).

Anyway, I'm not sure if someone ever reads this entry or any entry on this blog, but I'll try to keep my record on this. I want to add some memos on Ruby/RubyCocoa codes on this blog if I can.