Re: debugging a memory leak

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%googlemail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 20 May 2016 21:56:42 +0200
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:

> Hello,
> what tools do we have on NetBSD to find a memory leak in a userland
> program (actually OpenCPN - which is a large C++ program with dynamic
> libraries and uses dlopen()) ?
> 
> The memory usage of the process is slowy growing, until the systems
> gets out of ram/swap and kills it (on my evbarm which has no swap it
> takes about 2 days).
> 
> -- 
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
>      NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
> --

What does pmap tell you? Is there a particular segment of memory that
grows over time? Some memory leaks are quite difficult to find, for
example if you create and terminate many threads, but you don't call
pthread_join(), the size of your process will probably keep on growing,
not sure if memory leak tools will be able to detect this.