no messages to max window

Kessito's icon

Hi all,

I have a patch which is meant to run as standalone for long times without rebooting.
I have the issue that the messages to the MAX window causes memory leakage over the long term.
My question is: is there a way to clear the max window with a command, or is it possible to stop the max window from reporting messages?

thanks,
Kessito

Peter Castine's icon

Are you sure this is not just symbol table build-up?

Most claims that Max is "leaking memory" are, in fact, simply the behavior that symbols, once created, live forever in the symbol hash table. This is not a 'memory leak'.

Along the same lines: external objects, once loaded, live in memory forever (ie, until the Max session is ended).

In re: messages to the Max window, the obvious thing to try is to keep the window closed. Don't know how much difference this will make, but worth trying.

MuShoo's icon

Maybe this is a good spot to bring up discussion about the symbol hash table in general.

Honestly I've always been a little confused as to the way the thing worked, and why there was never an hourly wipe or something of it.

Just having a time+date display somewhere on your interface (especially if it has a display of seconds) could cause thousands of messages to be written to the hash table (I had a setup that would automatically name files saved out, for a while, and it would generate strings regularly. Now I'm smarter, and know better ways to do it, but I get the feeling I'm still generating a ton of unique strings).