On Mar 5, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Deomid Ryabkov wrote: > On 03/05/2011 04:02 AM, Eric Anderson wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I have a moderately threaded userland program (all C) I am working on (using >> pthreads, freebsd 8.1 64bit). It seems to leak memory (using standard >> malloc/free) badly. > as opposed to what? OpenBSD? Linux? Windows? why do you think your problem is > specific to FreeBSD (as evidenced by your post to a FreeBSD-specific list) or > is related to threaded programs?
OpenSolaris and Mac OS X. I didn't really assume or state it was specific to FreeBSD, just that this scenario was on FreeBSD. I happen to do most of the development and testing on OS X and FreeBSD, and I've enjoyed the FreeBSD community for a very long time. > >> I am using pcap to capture packets and process them. I have a handful of >> libs statically linked in (pcap is one, the rest don't seem to matter - I >> can remove them and still see the leak). >> >> Does anyone know of issues regarding malloc/free on multithreaded userland >> apps? > hell yeah. it goes like this: you malloc() then forget to free() - boom, you > have a memory leak. > > you're welcome. Thanks, very insightful. > > > sarcasm aside, those questions still remain: why do you think os/libraries > are the problem and not your code? Because I am tracking all malloc and free calls within the application code (aside from libraries) and I can account for all malloc'ed memory and freed memory in both count and by bytes, yet looking at ps output shows a very different story, and if I leave it run long enough, will consume all memory and swap in the system and then be killed off. I wrapped malloc/free in a function, and record all memory alloc'ed and free'd. The only memory I cannot track is memory alloced and freed by libraries I am pulling in (well, can't track easily anyway without hacking through all of their source code). > you can't post all of it, ok, and we don't want all of it either. can you > isolate a specific example of where valid usage of a library causes a leak? Not really - if I could, I would have fixed it by now. It's a non-trivial issue - which is why I am beginning to suspect something more complicated than a "oops I forgot to free" kind of error. Plus, I have seen a few people elsewhere on various forums/mailing lists with similar issues claiming that switching to the Hoard allocator fixed the problem (which doesn't seem to be happy with 32bit FreeBSD - tried it). I have also seen various comments about pthreads and memory allocators having apparent leaks at some threading level, but not sure. Thanks, Eric _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
