Detecting Memory Leaks

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

valgrind.

-miah

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Samuel Donham wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Normally, I wouldn't ask for help with work-related problems, but I'm out
> of ideas.  If anyone can provide a reasonable answer to this, I'm bringing
> a stack of free pizzas to the next BLU meeting.
> 
> One of my clients claims that I have a memory leak in one of our
> applications.  He claims that 'top' reports my app is slowly consuming
> more memory after running for 30 days (now 20 megs, up from 8 when it was
> first started).  Perhaps there is a memory leak, but I don't think 'top'
> is a good indicator of one ('free' would be much better).  In addition,
> I've searched high and low for the leak with no success.  I've also run
> Valgrind (http://valgrind.kde.org) on my app, with no report of a leak.
> 
> My question is, does anyone have any creative ideas to prove that a leak
> does NOT exist?  It's far easier to prove that one does exist than to
> prove it does not.  Knowing that the memory will likely be released after
> some time, I need to prove this but it will take months for the app to run
> in order to so.  I would like to limit the amount of memory the app is
> allowed to consume.  I've tried using 'ulimit,' but the app repeatedly
> goes over the limit (soft and hard).  Using '/etc/security' may work, but
> I'm reluctant to try for it's on a per-user basis, and I would like a
> per-process basis.
> 
> Any ideas?  What's YOUR favorite means of detecting memory leaks?  Lastly,
> what kind of pizza/soda  do you like?
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks guys, see you at the next
> meeting.
> -sam
> 
> 
> 
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