General Allocations

In Smalltalk MT 4.2 we have introduced a new way to track allocations in a general sense.

In the installed Smalltalk MT directory under 'support' and under 'debug', you will find debug versions of the Smalltalk MT runtime DLLs (the non-debug versions are in subdirectory system).

Notice that these are bigger than their retail counterparts because they were compiled with debug options turned on. In addition, the strtdll40.dll will report garbage collection activity to the debug monitor program (e.g. Dbmon or WinDbg).

To use this debug DLL, simply copy it to where your image is located.

Run Dbmon to view the output. Then run the development environment. You can force a garbage collection cycle by doing a Help->About Smalltalk. The output is shown below. Notice the GC cycles (garbage collection cycles) at the top caused by me opening Help->About Smalltalk.

In the following lines, the number of allocations are shown since the last GC cycle. This gives a good idea of the general number of allocations being performed by your program. The output happens about once a second so can be safely run for a benign look at allocations.