Re: testing malloc / free behaviour

[David Ayers]

David Wetzel schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> just run this and a top in a different terminal. If the memory use of the 
> process goes down after the 
> "freeing..." message, all is fine.
> 
> It works as expected on Mac OS X Leopard and NetBSD 3.1
> 
> You might set your limits to unlimited before running this.


http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Freeing-after-Malloc.html#Freeing-after-Malloc
[http://tinyurl.com/yqh6n4]

"Occasionally, free can actually return memory to the operating system
and make the process smaller. Usually, all it can do is allow a later
call to malloc to reuse the space. In the meantime, the space remains in
your program as part of a free-list used internally by malloc.

There is no point in freeing blocks at the end of a program, because all
of the program's space is given back to the system when the process
terminates. "

Cheers,
David