Re: Memory leaks

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

From: "Carlos Pereira" [jose carlos pereira ist utl pt], Date: 10/02/2011 09:10:

> > something), but aside from that it's a pure waste of CPU cycles.
> I am sorry, I totally disagree.
> I can only see two cases. Either fixing these hundreds and hundreds of
> mem leaks is easy or difficult.
> In the first case, is just a question of plain laziness and bad
> programming practises. The second case is much worse, it means the code
> is badly designed.

A leak is a resource that outlives its lifetime, and becomes "lost".  Where are these leaks you're so worried 
about?

Some of them can be recovered by shutting down services that were started due to being required by what you 
WERE doing.  Those services will be shut down when there's no chance of needing them again.  If that happens 
to be at application shutdown, then why not allow the OS to reclaim them in bulk, if doing so will properly 
and correctly recover those resources.

As has already been pointed out at least once, memory allocated during initialisation (possibly of components 
required but otherwise independent from the one you were actually using) that isn't a progressively worsening 
problem during the applications lifetime (the definition of a "leak"), and will be properly released by the 
OS at application shutdown, the cost of manually releasing those resources can amount to a significant and 
utterly unnecessary waste of effort.  Especially, and this is something I know about well as someone using 
older and limited hardware, if some of those resources or the referring structures thereof, are presently 
stored within swapped out memory.  I really don't want to have to sit around for an extra 10-20 seconds while 
a closing application crawls along pulling data from swap space for no particularly good reason, when the OS 
could have simply marked those pages as available and been done with it.


Fredderic