Re: upper limit on retain count

FROM : Daniel Jalkut
DATE : Tue Apr 19 07:05:52 2005

This is an interesting question, but I think you need to ask yourself 
a question. When you get to the point where you're clearly pushing 
the limits of a system's design, maybe you be doing it another way?

I would be suspicious of any design that requires an object to be 
retained by billions of other objects.  Is it possible that your 
"ownership" model is such that the billion objects can contain an 
unretained reference instead of a retained one?  If this is a 
situation where objects need to "back-reference" container or owner 
objects, then it often makes sense to make those references 
unretained to avoid circular ownership problems.

It seems unlikely that a billion objects could all have a legitimate 
claim of ownership over an object within one iteration of the run 
loop.  Maybe you can elaborate on your situation if you think it's 
well warranted...

Daniel

On Apr 18, 2005, at 1:43 PM, Ivan S. Kourtev wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I wasn't able to find any documented upper limits on retain count 
> on 32-bit machines (or in general).  I am interested in knowing 
> this because I foresee a situation where I may have objects with 
> retain counts of hundreds of millions of billions and more.  So the 
> two questions I have are:
>
> (1) is there a documented limit to the retain count?
> (2) is there a documented behavior once the retain count max is 
> reached?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> ivan
>
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