Improving Memory Management

Introduction

It should be in every project’s strategy to keep the runtime memory footprint to a reasonable size. All compute resources come with a fixed memory capacity (yes, there are such with more elastic capacity, but those are hard to come by). Unmanaged memory utilization will eventually lead to runtime failure - an undesirable false-positive for automation. Since Nexial is predominately written in Java, most of the memory management is managed internally by the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). However, Nexial provides a few ways for additional memory management.

Use nexial.manageMemory

The purpose of this System variable is to instruct Nexial to manage runtime memory utilization more aggressively. Setting this System variable as true will increase the frequency of JVM garbage collection to reclaim unreferenced heap memory space after completion of each iteration and script execution.

This is especially useful when executing over a large set of iterations. Nexial maintains iteration-bound data in support of “fallback to previous”. Setting nexial.manageMemory as true will effective clear all the unused data variables after each iteration.

For more details, please go through nexial.manageMemory.

Use base.clear(vars)

This will instruct Nexial to remove one or more variables from current execution, more specifically from current iteration. It doesn’t mean that Nexial will remove variable from script or data files. It clears the specified data variables from the runtime memory. For more details, please go through base.clear(vars).