Re: [Valgrind-users] Memcheck and on-the-fly memory leak detection.

[David C. <dcc...@ac...>]

On 11/28/2011 12:42 PM, Ehab Ababneh wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have looked at Memcheck and found out that it detects memory leaks 
> *after* finishing executing the guest application (i.e.no 
> <http://i.e.no/> memory leak is detected as soon the last reference to 
> the allocated memory chunk is out of scope). Is that right or did I 
> miss something?
>
> Thanks.
>

That is correct.  Memcheck is not a garbage collection system and does 
not count memory references dynamically.  That would slow down your 
program even more.  There are many ways in which references to memory 
can be "lost", such as storing a new value in a pointer variable, and 
without reference counts every one of these ways would trigger a full 
memory scan.  In many applications, most memory is not released when 
execution exits some scope; instead it is passed from module to module.  
Thus there would not be much advantage to a scan every time you return 
from a function, restart a loop iteration, etc.

-- 
     David Chapman         dcc...@ac...
     Chapman Consulting -- San Jose, CA