From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jun 23 11:30:32 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id LAA21189 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 23 Jun 1995 11:30:32 -0700 Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id LAA21181 for ; Fri, 23 Jun 1995 11:30:25 -0700 Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de with SMTP (5.67b+/DEC-Ultrix/4.3) id AA06109; Fri, 23 Jun 1995 20:29:43 +0200 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id UAA14069 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 23 Jun 1995 20:29:43 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.6.11/8.6.9) id UAA29712 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 23 Jun 1995 20:19:12 +0200 From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199506231819.UAA29712@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: Memory leak somewhere? To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 20:19:11 +0200 (MET DST) Reply-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) In-Reply-To: <9506230937.AA26679@elbe.desy.de> from "Lars Gerhard Kuehl" at Jun 23, 95 11:37:49 am Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 894 Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk As Lars Gerhard Kuehl wrote: > > > Relink the server with either -lgnumalloc or -ldlmalloc (found in > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > ports/devel/libdlmalloc). The libc's malloc take as much as two times the > > memory needed per allocation. > > That may reduce memory loss, but doesn't really solve the problem. > Unused memory needs to be actually released. Standard malloc is not supposed to ever return the freed space back to the operating system. GNU malloc does (i.e., it is able to reduce the brk value in case it's detecting that this is possible). Even SGI's X server suffers from this problem, especially since they are too proud to admit this and didn't tell their xdm to restart the server at logout. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)