Memory leak tool tells me zero leaks but memory footprint keeps rising

Question

I\'m running through some memory profiling for my application in SDK 3.2 and I used the \'Leak\' profiler to find all my memory leaks and I plugged all of them up. This is a sc

Answer 1

This sounds like it could be one of a few things:

• Memory not given back to OS after deallocation. This is a common design for C runtimes. When you do an allocation the C runtime allocates more memory for its use and returns a chunk of it for you to use. When you do a free the C runtime simply marks it as deallocated but doesn't return it back to the OS. Thus if the Leak Tool is reading OS level statistics rather than C runtime statistics the Leak tool will fail to report a corresponding decrease in memory usage.

• Misleading values reported by Leak Tool Memory. The Leak Tool could be looking at different values than the C runtime and is reporting values that will cause you concern even though nothing is wrong (just as people try to use Task Manager in Windows for detecting leaks and get very confused with the results because it is a very poor tool indeed for that job).

• Fragmentation. It is possible that your application is suffering from memory fragmentation. That is when you allocate, then deallocate then allocate, subsequent attempted allocations are larger than the "holes" left by deallocations. When this happens you fragment the memory space, leaving unusable holes, preventing large contiguous memory blocks and forcing the usage of more and more memory space until you run out of memory. This is a pathological condition and the fix is typically application specific.

I think the first of these three suggestions is most likely what is happening.