Memory stability of a C++ application in Linux

Question

I want to verify the memory stability of a C++ application I wrote and compiled for Linux. It is a network application that responds to remote clients connectings in a rate of 10-20 connections per second. On long run, memory was rising to 50MB, eventhough the app was making calls to delete...

Investigation shows that Linux does not immediately free memory. So here are my questions :

How can force Linux to free memory I actually freed? At least I want to do this once to verify memory stability. Otherwise, is there any reliable memory indicator that can report memory my app is actually holding?

Answer 1

What you are seeing is most likely not a memory leak at all. Operating systems and malloc/new heaps both do very complex accounting of memory these days. This is, in general, a very good thing. Chances are any attempt on your part to force the OS to free the memory will only hurt both your application performance and overall system performance.

To illustrate:

1. The Heap reserves several areas of virtual memory for use. None of it is actually committed (backed by physical memory) until malloc'd.

2. You allocate memory. The Heap grows accordingly. You see this in task manager.

3. You allocate more memory on the Heap. It grows more.

4. You free memory allocated in Step 2. The Heap cannot shrink, however, because the memory in #3 is still allocated, and Heaps are unable to compact memory (it would invalidate your pointers).

5. You malloc/new more stuff. This may get tacked on after memory allocated in step #3, because it cannot fit in the area left open by free'ing #2, or because it would be inefficient for the Heap manager to scour the heap for the block left open by #2. (depends on the Heap implementation and the chunk size of memory being allocated/free'd)

So is that memory at step #2 now dead to the world? Not necessarily. For one thing, it will probably get reused eventually, once it becomes efficient to do so. In cases where it isn't reused, the Operating System itself may be able to use the CPU's Virtual Memory features (the TLB) to "remap" the unused memory right out from under your application, and assign it to another application -- on the fly. The Heap is aware of this and usually manages things in a way to help improve the OS's ability to remap pages.

These are valuable memory management techniques that have the unmitigated side effect of rendering fine-grained memory-leak detection via Process Explorer mostly useless. If you want to detect small memory leaks in the heap, then you'll need to use runtime heap leak-detection tools. Since you mentioned that you're able to build on Windows as well, I will note that Microsoft's CRT has adequate leak-checking tools built-in. Instructions for use found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/974tc9t1(v=vs.100).aspx

There are also open-source replacements for malloc available for use with GCC/Clang toolchains, though I have no direct experience with them. I think on Linux Valgrind is the preferred and more reliable method for leak-detection anyway. (and in my experience easier to use than MSVCRT Debug).

Answer 2

The latest dlmalloc() has a concept called an mspace (others call it a region). You can call malloc() and free() against an mspace. Or you can delete the mspace to free all memory allocated from the mspace at once. Deleting an mspace will free memory from the process.

If you create an mspace with a connection, allocate all memory for the connection from that mspace, and delete the mspace when the connection closes, you would have no process growth.

If you have a pointer in one mspace pointing to memory in another mspace, and you delete the second mspace, then as the language lawyers say "the results are undefined".

Answer 3

It is not typical for an OS to release memory when you call free or delete. This memory goes back to the heap manager in the runtime library.

If you want to actually release memory, you can use brk. But that opens up a very large can of memory-management worms. If you directly call brk, you had better not call malloc. For C++, you can override new to use brk directly.

Not an easy task.

Answer 4

I very much doubt that anything beyond wrapping malloc and free [or new and delete ] with another function can actually get you anything other than very rough estimates.

One of the problems is that the memory that is freed can only be released if there is a long contiguous chunk of memory. What typically happens is that there are "little bits" of memory that are used all over the heap, and you can't find a large chunk that can be freed.

It's highly unlikely that you will be able to fix this in any simple way.

And by the way, your application is probably going to need those 50MB later on when you have more load again, so it's just wasted effort to free it.

(If the memory that you are not using is needed for something else, it will get swapped out, and pages that aren't touched for a long time are prime candidates, so if the system runs low on memory for some other tasks, it will still reuse the RAM in your machine for that space, so it's not sitting there wasted - it's just you can't use 'ps' or some such to figure out how much ram your program uses!)

As suggested in a comment: You can also write your own memory allocator, using mmap() to create a "chunk" to dole out portions from. If you have a section of code that does a lot of memory allocations, and then ALL of those will definitely be freed later, to allocate all those from a separate lump of memory, and when it's all been freed, you can put the mmap'd region back into a "free mmap list", and when the list is sufficiently large, free up some of the mmap allocations [this is in an attempt to avoid calling mmap LOTS of times, and then munmap again a few millisconds later]. However, if you EVER let one of those memory allocations "escape" out of your fenced in area, your application will probably crash (or worse, not crash, but use memory belonging to some other part of the application, and you get a very strange result somewhere, such as one user gets to see the network content supposed to be for another user!)

Answer 5

I would suggest using valgrind with memcheck tool or any other profiling tool for memory leaks

from Valgrind's page:

Memcheck

detects memory-management problems, and is aimed primarily at C and C++ programs. When a program is run under Memcheck's supervision, all reads and writes of memory are checked, and calls to malloc/new/free/delete are intercepted. As a result, Memcheck can detect if your program:

• Accesses memory it shouldn't (areas not yet allocated, areas that have been freed, areas past the end of heap blocks, inaccessible areas of the stack).
• Uses uninitialised values in dangerous ways.
• Leaks memory.
• Does bad frees of heap blocks (double frees, mismatched frees).
• Passes overlapping source and destination memory blocks to memcpy() and related functions.

Memcheck reports these errors as soon as they occur, giving the source line number at which it occurred, and also a stack trace of the functions called to reach that line. Memcheck tracks addressability at the byte-level, and initialisation of values at the bit-level. As a result, it can detect the use of single uninitialised bits, and does not report spurious errors on bitfield operations. Memcheck runs programs about 10--30x slower than normal. Cachegrind

Massif

Massif is a heap profiler. It performs detailed heap profiling by taking regular snapshots of a program's heap. It produces a graph showing heap usage over time, including information about which parts of the program are responsible for the most memory allocations. The graph is supplemented by a text or HTML file that includes more information for determining where the most memory is being allocated. Massif runs programs about 20x slower than normal.

Using valgrind is as simple as running application with desired switches and give it as an input of valgrind:

valgrind --tool=memcheck ./myapplication -f foo -b bar

Answer 6

Use valgrind to find memory leaks : valgrind ./your_application

It will list where you allocated memory and did not free it.

I don't think it's a linux problem, but in your application. If you monitor the memory usage with « top » you won't get very precise usages. Try using massif (a tool of valgrind) : valgrind --tool=massif ./your_application to know the real memory usage.

As a more general rule to avoid leaks in C++ : use smart pointers instead of normal pointers. Also in many situations, you can use RAII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization) instead of allocating memory with "new".