# Excessive Memory Usage with libxml **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [May 22, 2007, 7:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excessive-memory-usage-with-libxml/104803 "2007-05-22T19:28:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![liquid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/47e85d/32.png) [@liquid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquid)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 7:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excessive-memory-usage-with-libxml/104803/1 "2007-05-22T19:28:07Z")
Hi, I hope this is the right place for this. I’m writing a markup mangler that I’m using libxml for. Primarily for speed reasons. I’ve got some basic functionality going, it’s not finished, and when I’m doing a benchmark I get some good figures. I’m using a recursive function to process my data. The general gist of it is as follows [http://pastie.caboo.se/63584](http://pastie.caboo.se/63584) But… When I run the benchmark I get weird things happening. All benchmarks exhibit steadily increasing memory usage until the end of the benchmark 10000 iterations were fine very much above this and I started to get malloc errors or segmentation fault I changed doc.root.to\_s.gsub( /\/, “” ) to doc.root.to\_a.join.gsub( /\/, “” ) taking a hit on performance, but it allowed me to get through 100,000 iterations. The memory usage though was stupid at 235Mb Real and 233Mb Virtual The HTML I am parsing is a fairly small snippet I’m running on Mac OsX. Any ideas what and why? thankyou Daniel ---
**Author:** ![liquid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/47e85d/32.png) [@liquid](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquid)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 7:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excessive-memory-usage-with-libxml/104803/2 "2007-05-22T19:44:09Z")
On 5/23/07, Daniel N [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I’m using a recursive function to process my data. The general gist > of the benchmark > > Any ideas what and why? > thankyou > > Daniel I’ve managed to reproduce the error by changing to Benchmark.bmbm. It is ruby(3775) malloc: \*\*\* Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x3903a60; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug ruby(3775) malloc: \*\*\* Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x75b0750; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug ruby(3775) malloc: \*\*\* Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x75c4950; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug ./markup\_mangler\_benchmark.rb:79: [BUG] Segmentation fault