Finding Memory Leaks

Boehm''s Garbage collection library is avaliable from Xerox for free, and can perform leak detection as well as garbage collection. (Because, after all, every time you need to collect the garbage, you''ve got a leak. )

Sounds pretty good . But what part of the site is that on? (I used the search utility, but I was unable to find it)

--TheGoop

Yeah, I looked for the thing on www.xerox.com for it too, but couldn''t find it...

Here''s a Xerox ftp directory: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/gc/

But aparantly since the last time I checked, Boehm had moved from Xerox to SGI to HP. Here''s the HP link, I didn''t check if the library was actually more recent than the Xerox Parc link.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

If you run in debug mode, you can just use the _Crt functions to detect any over/undrwrite, memoryleaks and other useful information from the debug heap. Easy to use, for example run _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() at the end of your program.

/ LC

I read in VC++ Developers Journal a while ago that _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks will give incorrect results if you include header files that declare objects, such as iostream.h (declared cout, cin, etc..). It said that it will return the size of those objects, because their destructors haven''t been run yet. It this true?

Of course that''s assuming you''re using Visual C++.

Qoy - I had those problems..So I would say it''s true. I logged it to the hd and got a 81k file with all the leaks in my application. Think I had any? Nah.

"Paranoia is the belief in a hidden order behind the visible." - Anonymous

One thing I''ve done to help track memory leaks was to override the new and delete operators to make them count the number of bytes allocated and deallocated. You may also want to look into creating your own memory manager that allocates memory in large blocks - this way you can help prevent fragmentation (or at least control w/ your own routines) and you simply deallocate all the blocks at the end. Just some ideas...
- Kane THP

"Feed the Children, Save the Whales, Free the Mallocs!"