GDBM leaks memory

[Grzegorz Chrupała]

Hi,
I've been using the Mozart GDBM interface and I noticed that you can 
store large amounts of distinct keys (say strings or integers) in a 
GDBM file with no problem. However when you then iterate over those 
keys, for example with GDBM.forAll or GDBM.forAllInd, Mozart seems to 
leak memory. I may be wrong, but I believe it is due to the fact that 
even if the keys stored were integers or strings, they are always 
returned as atoms, and IIRC atoms are not garbage collected in Mozart. 
So a large number of atoms is created and never collected, causing the 
memory leak.
Thus a couple of the reasons I had for using using a disk based 
associative datastructure such as GDBM are defeated: I used GDBM 
instead of dictionaries to avoid having to convert strings to atoms, 
but atoms are created anyway. I also used GDBM for very large amounts 
of data to avoid having to keep them in memory, but retrieving data 
from GDBM quickly eats up memory anyway.
Cheers,
-- 
Grzegorz Chrupała