[gate-users] memory usage of GATE

[Christian Wietholt]

Dear all, 

A couple of weeks ago I expressed my concern about an increasing memory 
consumption of GATE 2.2 when compiling with gcc 3.4. Similar observations 
were made by other Gate users. I decided to investigate this matter a little 
further. I tested compilation of Gate using gcc 3.4 on Debian stable, Debian 
unstable and Fedora Core 3, always with the same result, that Gate's usage of 
memory increases, until it runs into allocation problems. When compiling Gate 
with gcc 3.3, everything seems to be fine. 

During my tests, I always generated the static as well as the shared 
libraries. On my latest test, I decided to only generate the static 
libraries. When running my test macro, I observered no increased memory 
consumption of Gate. I am not sure where to look for the root of this 
problem, but I would imagine that something in gcc 3.4 changed, that may have 
caused it. I also made similar observations with Gate 1.2.0 as well. 

I hope this information will help anybody else in their work. 

Thanks, 

Christian