Heap memory leak in Pari/GP 2.1.4 during vector operations.

[Alexander Shumakovitch <shurik@math.unibas.ch>]

This is my first post to the list, so I would like to start by thanking
everybody involved for this wonderful program!

Now back to business ;-) I'm doing some computation using Pari which involve,
in particular, calling one function many (hundreds) times with different
arguments. The function in question assigns some values to global variables,
but doesn't increase their sizes dramatically. Nonetheless, I've noticed
(using 'top') a huge increase in the memory usage with each run of the
function (like 20M per run). getheap() also shows an increase in occupied
blocks. Pari segfaults after just dozens of calls to the functions and I have
to intervene manually every time to restart the computations.

This is the background. After some tries, I've managed to trace down the
problem to initializations of vectors (or matrices) whose entries are going to
be vectors as well. I used to do it in one operator. But in this case
assignment of arbitrary values to elements of those vectors grabs some blocks
on heap, which are not freed even after doing kill().

Here is how to trigger the bug:
  (20:35) gp > v=vector(2,i,vector(i));v[2][1]=5;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %2 = [34, 225]
  (20:35) gp > v=vector(2,i,vector(i));v[2][1]=5;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %3 = [35, 232]
  (20:35) gp > v=vector(2,i,vector(i));v[2][1]=5;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %4 = [36, 239]

I have histsize set to 1, so the growth of the history array is not an issue.
Apparently, one more block is being allocated every time without being freed
later. An equivalent (in my view, at least) construction works just fine:
  (20:35) gp > v=vector(2);v[1]=vector(1);v[2]=vector(2);v[2][1]=5;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %5 = [39, 266]
  (20:39) gp > v=vector(2);v[1]=vector(1);v[2]=vector(2);v[2][1]=5;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %6 = [39, 266]

And here is a similar bug with column assignments:
  (20:43) gp > x=vector(2)~;
  time = 0 ms.
  (20:43) gp > m=matrix(2,2);m[,2]=x;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %2 = [35, 240]
  (20:43) gp > m=matrix(2,2);m[,2]=x;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %3 = [36, 253]
  (20:43) gp > m=matrix(2,2);m[,2]=x;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %4 = [37, 264]

No problem with rows though:
  (20:43) gp > y=vector(2);
  time = 0 ms.
  (20:44) gp > m=matrix(2,2);m[2,]=y;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %7 = [40, 287]
  (20:44) gp > m=matrix(2,2);m[2,]=y;getheap
  time = 0 ms.
  %8 = [40, 287]

That's all at the moment ;-)

Thanks in advance!

  --- Alexander.