I am trying to understand concurrency and goroutines, and had a couple questions about the following experimental code:
- Why does it create a memory leak? I thought that a return at the end of the goroutine would allow memory associated with it to get cleaned up.
- Why do my loops almost never reach 999? In fact, when I output to a file and study the output, I notice that it rarely prints integers in double digits; the first time it prints "99" is line 2461, and for "999" line 6120. This behavior is unexpected to me, which clearly means I don't really understand what is going on with goroutine scheduling.
Disclaimer:
Be careful running the code below, it can crash your system if you don't stop it after a few seconds!
CODE
package main
import (
"fmt"
"sync"
)
func main() {
var wg sync.WaitGroup
for {
// spawn four worker goroutines
spawnWorkers(4, wg)
// wait for the workers to finish
wg.Wait()
}
}
func spawnWorkers(max int, wg sync.WaitGroup) {
for n := 0; n < max; n++ {
wg.Add(1)
go func() {
defer wg.Done()
f(n)
return
}()
}
}
func f(n int) {
for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
fmt.Println(n, ":", i)
}
}