Re: Memory leak

[george anzinger <george@mvista.com>]

"Richard B. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Aleksandar Kacanski wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > I am running 2.4.18-3 version of the kernel on smp dual
> > processor and 1GB of RAM. My memory usage is increasing and
> > I can't find what exactly is eating memory. Top and proc
> > are reporting increases, but I would like to know of a
> > better way of tracing usage of memory and possible leak in
> > application(s).
> >
> > Please reply to kacanski@yahoo.com
> > thanks                Sasha
> >
> >
> 
> Applications that use malloc() and friends, get more memory from
> the kernel by resetting the break address. It's called "morecore()".
> You can put a procedure, perhaps off SIGALRM, that periodically
> checks the break address and writes it to a log. Applications
> that end up with an ever-increasing break address have memory
> leaks. Note that the break address is almost never set back.
> This is not an error; malloc() assumes that if you used a lot
> of memory once, you'll probably use it again. Check out sbrk()
> and brk() in the man pages.

But this all comes back when the application ends.  You
should be able to see the memory reappear when the app
terminates.

-- 
George Anzinger   george@mvista.com
High-res-timers: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/
Preemption patch:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml