So did this get resolved? David mentioned to me that he looked into it and came up with a fix but I don't see any commits to the starjava repository in a month.
It would be nice if the one and only user of JNIAST that is not an ex-Starlink person can use it properly again without having to do an exec.
Tim
On Oct 22, 2010, at 4:24 AM, Mark Taylor wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> following a bug report from Mike Read (I didn't know anybody apart
> from SPLAT and Treeview was using JNIAST), it seems there are memory
> leak issues with the JNIAST FitsChan. In fact there are leaks both
> in the java heap and in the C heap. Mike was creating, using, and
> discarding (via the gc) millions of FitsChans in a servlet,
> and this was causing the JVM to generate OutOfMemoryErrors and/or
> the process to allocate so much system virtual memory that it got
> terminated.
>
> I spent some effort (~ 1 day) looking into this; the code (mine)
> is a nasty combination of clever and incorrect, my only excuse is
> that it was one of the earliest bits of java I'd written.
> I can improve matters somewhat; I can fix the Java leak, though
> not very elegantly, but memory still seems to be leaking on the C side.
> No doubt a solution exists, but I really don't have the leisure
> to look into this any more in the forseeable future, so I'm just
> going to have to put a warning sign on the FitsChan class.
> Probably, the number of people creating a large number of JNIAST
> FitsChans is small (=1), so I doubt this will cause widespread
> inconvenience. I sorted Mike out with an alternative arrangement
> which involves doing an exec from java to a pure AST binary.
>
> This message is just to notify anybody who is now or might in the future
> try to work with, or handle bug reports about, JNIAST FitsChans,
> that there is a known problem. Of course if somebody else is keen
> to attempt to fix it, they're welcome.
>
> The AST FitsChan class itself is quite blameless.
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
> [log in to unmask] +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
--
Tim Jenness
Joint Astronomy Centre
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