Hi Bert,

On Sep 1, 2014, at 4:31 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:

> On 31.08.2014, at 09:50, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 2014-08-30 15:31 GMT+02:00 Bernhard Pieber <bernhard at pieber.com>:
>>> During processing of update-eem.287.mcm a popup menu appears saying that the Squeak4.5-13680.changes file does not exist. This is incorrect because the file exists. When I choose Debug I get FileDoesNotExistException. See the attached PNG and SqueakDebug.log.
>> It happens to me from time to time.
>> I suspect that there are two many files opened before the reclamation facility has a chance to work.
>> I suspect the read-only copy of change file to open those files.
> 
> Yep. I noticed that on my SqueakJS VM (which does not yet support weak refs/finalization), in a Squeak 4.5 image the sources and changes files are opened many many times but never closed (I'm refcounting the handles).
> 
> I suspect a strategically placed #close after we're done with the read-only copy would solve this problem for good.
> 
> Even with finalization support it's a good idea to actually close files when you're done, because it's unpredictable when the finalizer will actually run.
> 
> Another thought is that given the abundance of memory these days, we might cache both sources and changes in main memory (which would also speed up full-text searches).

Pharo is planning to eliminate them altogether which is more coherent than caching them.  But IMO the solution is easy, maintain a *single* read-only copy of the sources and changes files in SourceFilesArray (or whatever the class is called; I'm on my phone) and read source through them instead of reopen ing the damn things all the time.  Then the file's own buffers will provide done caching.  Annoying that I write this code in 2008 for newspeak but we still rely on the mad "run the GC to finalize files when open fails" approach.

> - Bert -

Eliot phone