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From: MUHRTH@tubvm.cs.tu-berlin.de (Thomas Muhr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: limitation for amount of Symbol instances??!!
Message-ID: <90228.171958MUHRTH@DB0TUI11.BITNET>
Date: 16 Aug 90 15:19:58 GMT
Organization: Technical University Berlin
Lines: 18

We just found our limits !-)
If what we found is true, there is really a severe limitation of ST V
for large applications: well known from the manual is the fact, that
instances of class Symbol are excluded from garbage collection and that -
from time to time - you have to manually recollect space by issuing
Symbol purgeUnusedSymbols.
But nowhere have I found a note about the upper limit for Symbols: In ours
it is 5157, despite enough memory left for objects (1.5 MB unusedMemory).
We have to redesign the system to never using any "asSymbol" or the like
for Strings. The number of Symbols includes every classname and selector in
the system, so that you have to be careful of how many methods you create,
which contrasts the philosophy of OOP significantly.
Our only hope is that some "goodie" (or baddy ?) has modified the complicated
management of objects in an unpleasant way.
Has anybody else experienced this barrier?
Thanks in advance -
Thomas
PS.: Maybe it just got to late today.......