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.

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