Memory usage

Hi Gordon,

I just run into "out of memory". I tried to figure out where it happend and what can i optimise to prevent this. I saw that i had around 300 units (Junks of 20 bytes) free before i called a few cascaded functions that converts a string into an array of bytes, calculates checksums length and returns it.

To understand the usage in general i run the following test:

console.log(process.memory());
str='Hi Gordon, a string with 80 characters, that will be converted to an array of B';
console.log(process.memory());

Output:

{"free":1782,"usage":18,"total":1800,"history":3,"stackEndAddress":536909496,"flash_start":134217728,"flash_binary_end":134435552,"flash_code_start":134443008,"flash_length":262144}
{"free":1775,"usage":25,"total":1800,"history":14,"stackEndAddress":536909496,"flash_start":134217728,"flash_binary_end":134435552,"flash_code_start":134443008,"flash_length":262144}

7*20 bytes=140 bytes for a string of 80 chars. Nothing special.

Now i created an array of 80 bytes this way:

console.log(process.memory());
bytes=[];
for (var i = 0; i < 80; ++i) { bytes.push(i); }
console.log(process.memory());

The output:

{"free":1782,"usage":18,"total":1800,"history":3,"stackEndAddress":536909496,"flash_start":134217728,"flash_binary_end":134435552,"flash_code_start":134443008,"flash_length":262144}
{"free":1618,"usage":182,"total":1800,"history":15,"stackEndAddress":536909496,"flash_start":134217728,"flash_binary_end":134435552,"flash_code_start":134443008,"flash_length":262144}

That array needs 164 chunks of 20 bytes = 3280 bytes, nearly 10% of the available memory!?

Is this as expected ?

Thanks

Sacha