The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Plugging leaky memory

Just because a language has garbage collection doesn't mean you still can't leak memory—you can easily leak memory, since quite a few modern langauges that have garbage collection have ways of calling into libraries written in C, and those can leak.

With that said, reading “Tracking down a memory leak in Ruby's EventMachine (link via Hacker News) was quite informative. Looking for patterns in the leaked memory as a means of tracking down what was being leaked was brilliant (“Well, as mentioned, 95+% of our program’s memory footprint is leaked objects. So if we just take a random sample of bits of memory, we will find leaked objects with very good probability.”). And I did not know you could call C functions from within gdb.

This is something I'll have to keep in mind for work.

Obligatory Picture

An abstract representation of where you're coming from]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.