Detecting Memory Leaks

Robert L Krawitz rlk at alum.mit.edu
Thu Jul 15 19:36:14 EDT 2004


   From: Bob Gorman <bob at rsi.com>
   Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:17:14 -0400

   At 04:01 PM 7/15/2004, Samuel Donham wrote:
   >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).

   You can also try some other display options of 'top', with the F
   (field) command.  You may find these fields of interest:

Valgrind is an excellent tool for this purpose, although it does slow
the application down tremendously.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton



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