Memory leaks can be tough and costly problems to solve, so it makes sense to use good tools to clearly point out and understand where the leaks are coming from. This article outlines an approach you can use while tackling memory leaks, and it discusses how to take advantage of the MALLOCDEBUG tool that is supplied with AIX.
this should be sent over to the firefox team?
*notices all of the evil looks* What WHAT!!?!?!
Sorry, lol….. I couldn’t help it. I know that memory leaks are a big complaint for some, perhaps they could do some developing on AIX machines to clean all of this up?
I’m just saying……………..
How about programming in a language that automates memory (de)allocation? There, no more memory leaks.
Actually, you can still have memory leaks even in languages that garbage collect or do reference counting. It’s not hard to add an object to some collection and then forget about. The collection just grows and grows until you run out of memory. Granted, it’s easier to find what is growing, because you can tell the JVM to dump it’s heap into a file for inspection.
Also, languages that do GC have the downside of actually cleaning up their memory space when they start running out of space, which causes pauses and general slowness. And nobody likes that.
When I use to program in BASIC I would call the FREE() function to force Garbage Collection when I wanted it done. Among other things if you called it often each FREE() took very little time to run.
Don’t all languages that do GC allow you to force it early to control delays?
Nice that this OS everyone forgot about which would not run on any of your computers anyways has this neat feature
But what about using memory leak detectors for detecting memory leaks instead?
Valgrind comes to mind