Strategies For Tracking Down Memory Leaks When You

Question

My program, alas, has a memory leak somewhere, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

Its job is to read in a bunch of ~2MB files, do some parsing and string replacement, then output them in various formats. Naturally, this means a lot of strings, and so doing memory tracing shows that I have a lot of strings, which is exactly what I'd expect. The structure of the program is a series of classes (each in their own thread, because I'm an idiot) that acts on an object that represents each file in memory. (Each object has an input queue that uses a lock on both ends. While this means I get to run this simple processing in parallel, it also means I have multiple 2MB objects sitting in memory.) Each object's structure is defined by a schema object.

My processing classes raise events when they've done their processing and pass a reference to the large object that holds all my strings to add it to the next processing object's queue. Replacing the event with a function call to add to the queue does not stop the leak. One of the output formats requires me to use an unmanaged object. Implementing Dispose() on the class does not stop the leak. I've replaced all the references to the schema object with an index name. No dice. I got no idea what's causing it, and no idea where to look. The memory trace doesn't help because all I see are a bunch of strings being created, and I don't see where the references are sticking in memory.

We're pretty much going to give up and roll back at this point, but I have a pathological need to know exactly how I messed this up. I know Stack Overflow can't exactly comb my code, but what strategies can you suggest for tracking this leak down? I'm probably going to do this in my own time, so any approach is viable.

Answer 1

I use the dotTrace profiler for tracking down memory leaks. It's a lot more deterministic than methodological trial and error and turns up results a lot faster.

For any actions that the system performs, I take a snapshot then run a few iterations of the function, then take another snapshot. Comparing the two will show you all the objects that were created in between but were not freed. You can then see the stack frame at the point of their creation, and therefore work out what instances are not being freed.

Answer 2

If your unmanaged object really is the cause of the leak, you may want to have it call AddMemoryPressure when it allocates unmanaged memory and RemoveMemoryPressure in Finalize/Dispose/where ever it deallocates the unmanaged memory. This will give the GC a better handle on the situation, because it may not realize there's a need to schedule collection otherwise.

Answer 3

Similar to Charlie Martin, you can do something like this:

static unigned __int64 _foo_id = 0;
foo::foo()
{
    ++_foo_id;
    if (_foo_id == MAGIC_BAD_ALLOC_ID)
        DebugBreak();
    std::werr << L"foo::foo @ " << _foo_id << std::endl;
}
foo::~foo()
{
    --_foo_id;
    std::werr << L"foo::~foo @ " << _foo_id << std::endl;
}

If you can recreate it, even once or twice with the same allocation id, this will let you look at what is happening right then and there (obviously TLS/threading has to be handled as well, if needed, but I left it out for clarity).

Answer 4

I like the CLR Profiler from Microsoft. It provides some great tools for visualizing the managed heap and tracking down leaks.

Answer 5

The best memory profiling tool for .Net is this:

http://memprofiler.com

Also, while I'm here, the best performance profiler for .Net is this:

http://www.yourkit.com/dotnet/download/index.jsp

They are also great value for money, have low overhead and are easy to use. Anyone serious about .Net development should consider both of these a personal investment and purchase immediately. Both of them have a free trial.

I work on a real time game engine with over 700k lines of code written in C# and have spent hundreds of hours using both these tools. I have used the Sci Tech product since 2002 and YourKit! for the last three years. Although I've tried quite a few of the others I have always returned to these.

IMHO, they are both absolutely brilliant.

Answer 6

How do you know for a fact that you actually have a memory leak?

One other thing: You write that your processing classes are using events. If you have registered an event handler it will keep the object that owns the event alive - i.e. the GC cannot collect it. Make sure you de-register all event handlers if you want your objects to be garbage collected.