M5Stack Dial with ESP32S3 memory seems not right

[tonyhuang1962]

CircuitPython version

Adafruit CircuitPython 9.0.0 on 2024-03-19; M5Stack Dial with ESP32S3

Code/REPL

import gc       
gc.collect()
start_mem = gc.mem_free()
print( "Available memory: {} bytes".format(start_mem) )

Behavior

Available memory: 162912 bytes

Description

This memory seems not right for M5Stack Dial with ESP32S3 ?

Additional information

No response

[tonyhuang1962]

When I run Adafruit CircuitPython 9.0.0 with M5Stack Dial with ESP32S3 to load Image Bitmap using adafruit_imageload.load, it always give me error like 'MemoryError: memory allocation failed, allocating 57600 bytes', thus I checked memory at the beginning of my program. To my surprise is it showed 'Available memory: 162912 bytes'. Is this correct?

[tannewt]

This can happen due to memory fragmentation. The M5Stack doesn't have external PSRAM so ~150k seems reasonable for the mem_free() value.

[tannewt]

It is possible that the TLSF allocation under the hood isn't performing very well when running out of memory. That's why I marked this as a bug (not support.)