clevertricks

Hi Linden people ? 1- SUMMARY I have performed a memory benchmark on LSL Mono scripts (see below for details). It shows that on average, for each global variable of type integer, more than 22 bytes are consumed from the script memory. 22 bytes is a lot, compared to the actual integer payload (4 bytes). Considering that LSL Mono scripts have only 64K bytes available, it would be nice to spare them... - What accounts for the 20+ bytes per integer? - Is there a way to reduce this memory consumption ? 2- BENCHMARK CODE The benchmark is very simple : integer i1; integer i2; integer i3; ... integer i<N-1>; integer i<N>; default { state_entry() { llOwnerSay((string) llGetFreeMemory()); } } 3- BENCHMARK RESULTS N llGetFreeMemory() Comments 0 62172 1 62164 2 bytes for integer i 2 62164 0 byte for i2 3 62156 2 bytes for i3 4 62156 0 byte for i4 5 62148 8 bytes for i5 6 62148 0 byte for i6 ... 10 62132 11 61612 520 BYTES FOR i11!!! 12 61612 0 byte for i12 13 61604 8 bytes for i13 14 61604 0 byte for i14 15 61596 8 bytes for i15 16 61596 ... 17 61588 18 61588 ... 38 61508 39 61508 40 60988 512 BYTES FOR i40!!! ... 1000 40252 21.9 byte average per integer 2000 17308 22.4 byte average per integer 2742 4 22.7 byte average per integer 2743 heap stack collision 4- TENTATIVE ANALYSIS Because global variables have to be re-initialized on script reset, I suspect Mono keeps a copy of the initial value in memory. This would account for 8 bytes per integer. The fact that free memory decreases by about 512 bytes with integers i11 and i40 (in the benchmark) suggests that i11 and i40 have resulted in an increase of the script's code size (in SL LSL, memory for code increases by chuncks of 512 bytes). Thus I suspect that for each global variable, in addition to the above-mentioned 8 bytes, the Mono compiler adds code to the script, to re-initialize the value of the variable on script reset. Still, 22 bytes per integer is an awful lot. For example, for un-assigned global integers (such as in the benchmark code), a simple loop assigning value 0 should suffice. Suggestions, anybody?