newbie question - killing a process

Bob Arning arning at charm.net
Sat Jun 30 21:30:44 UTC 2001


On Sat, 30 Jun 2001 16:51:16 -0400 (EDT) Rosemary Michelle Simpson <rms at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> FWIW, 34 processes seems like a very high number. Have you repeated the example you gave 20 or 30 times?
>
>It gets even stranger.  (1) the number of processes goes up and up and
>then down - it went as high as 85 and as low as 20.  (2) doing DoIt on
>(self at: n) terminate for the processes labeled "a Process in
>UndefinedObject>>DoIt" turns the comment to "a Process in nil" but even
>doing that to all has not gotten rid of the clock and new processes seem
>to be being spawned.  I feel like the sorcerer's apprentice...  Of course,
>I could trash this image and bring in another from the CD, but I want to
>understand how to work with the processes.

Rosemary,

The problem is that ProcessorScheduler>>yield creates a new, but very short-lived, process and this may happen very often. In order not to see these guys, which are really dead and soon-to-be-garbage-collected, inspect the following two lines as a single unit:

	Smalltalk garbageCollect.
	Process allInstances.

A clean image will have around 8 or 9 processes.

Cheers,
Bob





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