Re: memory leak problems, I might be doing something wrong

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, chinlu chinawa wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> I've been using valgrind with an appl. I'm in
> development of. After completely isolated my curses
> module I find that or I'm doing something wrong or
> there's some sort of problem with my system.
>
> I'm using the last patched version of curses
> (20061209), and I'm sending code to reproduce my
> problem together with valgrind's output:
>
> http://es.geocities.com/ucho_trabajo/curses/test.c.txt
> http://es.geocities.com/ucho_trabajo/curses/valgrind.txt
> http://es.geocities.com/ucho_trabajo/curses/valgrind_verbose.txt

That looks normal to me.  Unless ncurses is configured with 
--disable-leaks, it retains some chunks of memory for performance reasons 
and some other chunks to make refresh() work after endwin(), etc.
ncurses will "always" have memory allocated.

If you configure ncurses (at build time of course) using --disable-leaks, 
it frees memory that it _can_ (making it slower), and provides an 
entrypoint for testing leaks in the remaining chunks: _nc_free_and_exit().

The C programs (progs and test) use this feature - ifdef'd - and I use 
that for testing, usually with valgrind.  It's also useful for building
a test library, e.g., so I can factor out ncurses memory allocation from
analyzing other programs linked with it.  But since it makes the library
slower, it's not suitable for production use.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net