[gdal-dev] GDAL using tcmalloc accumulates memory

[Greg Troxel]

Javier Jimenez Shaw via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> I don't see the point of setting a default value to an option without
> knowing what is it doing, and if it is really solving a problem.
> At least now people can find your comment and try it if they want to.

Agreed.

The compiled defaults should be reasonable for the broad class of users.

I find environment variables being set in an "image", at all, quite
surprising.

And Stelios: I personally do not want to even indirectly read LLM
output.  If that can help you read the docs or find something reliable,
that's up to you but an extrusion from the soup of the internet is not
trustworthy.  It's certainly not a basis for changing anything in gdal.

I think it will take someone who really understands the layers of memory
allocation, and caching of allocations.  Allocators can try to retain
freed objects to speed future allocations at the expense of continuing
to use memory, instead of returning it to the next-higher-level
allocator.  If a massive amount of memory is retained in this way, that
sounds like a bug.

Separately, garbage collection is hard to do and hard to really
understand.