WallysFerreira
I’ve decided to do this year’s advent of code in elixir as my first approach to the language.
It’s been great but now on the second part of day 5 I’m facing a little problem.
When I try to run the code on iex, the process gets killed after a little while. I’ve done a little investigating and apparently the function “:lists.seq_loop/4” is using 1 gigabyte of memory and probably causing the system to shutdown the iex process.
I tried researching about memory management in elixir but only found out about :erlang.garbage_collect/0, and it didn’t make much difference.
If anyone could help with ideas to make the memory usage lower or any other ways to make it run, I’d gladly appreciate it
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hauleth
Check out the size of the ranges. You are trying to allocate gargantuantic lists and you are asking where you get the memory usage from. Answer lies in the amount of data that you want to store.
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al2o3cr
General tip about AoC problems: a favorite “part 2” tactic is to expand the problem in a way that makes inefficient solutions intractable. For instance, the solution for my day 5 part 2 was ~15 million so
locationswould likely be LARGEThere’s another one later on this year where the straightforward “generate and count” approach fails even more spectacularly - with my input, a counting approach would have taken quite a while to count to 15 trillion!
IMO this is the best part of AoC, since usually it takes months / years of “production” use to find out an algorithm is inefficient.
stevensonmt
You can usually get some benefit from changing
EnumtoStreamcalls as theStreamfunctions are lazy and do not allocate all that memory up front with each call.stevensonmt
Yeah when the ranges are massive even lazy evaluation is going to eat up memory. Like others have said, thinking in terms other than evaluating each item is key for this sort of problem.
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dimitarvp
Can you show how you tried using Streams?