Re: documentation.scm close files

[tomas]

On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 08:40:09AM +1000, Kevin Ryde wrote:

 [...]

> As threatened, but in the form of a revision of the "Ports" node.  The
> first three paras are existing words slightly warmed-over, the rest is
> new.

I like your text very much.However...

>    It is strongly recommended that file ports be explicitly closed when
> no longer required.  Most systems have limits on how many files can be
> open, both on a per-process and a system-wide basis.  A program that
> uses many files should take care not to to upset its own or other
> program's operations by hitting those limits.  The same applies to
> similar system resources such as pipes and sockets.

it seems important to me to make even clearer that the garbage collector
is triggered when we are short on memory (something along the lines
of ``the system will trigger the garbage collector based on memory
usage, but it won't notice if it is running low on file descriptors,
so don't depend on the garbage collector to automatically close unused
files''). Of course, using your clear language :-)

(As an anecdotal note, we once witnessed one Java application where
the one resource left to the garbage collector was the number of
Oracle client licenses. There was plenty of memory, so...)

Regardsand thanks for the good work!

-- tomas