[PD-dev] Malloc Error occuring with PD 0.41.4

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Aug 31, 2009, at 11:44 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, james murray wrote:
>
>> It steadily creeps up in memory used until I have approx 140 mb of  
>> free memory on the computer.  And although I noticed that it  
>> occasionally flashed all the way down to only 6 - 9 MB of free  
>> memory at some points for a flickering moment, when it finally  
>> crashed it was listing free memory at around 133 mb.  It took  
>> almost two hours for this to occur.
>
> This is a kind of bug called a Memory Leak. Look for those words, to  
> find a tool that can look for those bugs. I don't know about OSX.  
> I'd use Valgrind but I'm on Linux.
>
> The direct cause of the crash looks definitely like a mishandling of  
> an Out-of-Memory situation, but everybody would agree that the  
> solution to that is to fix the leak and not to improve the Out-of- 
> Memory handler...
>
> When I didn't have Valgrind, I used to measure the memory usage over  
> a long time, use it to figure out how much memory was lost per video  
> frame, and use that information as a hint. But the hint can only be  
> used by someone who has had a good overview of the program's code.  
> It should also be noted that the amount lost will be a little bigger  
> than the size of the offending allocation, as malloc needs some  
> space for its own administration... (typically 4-16 bytes more per  
> malloc call)

Its probably worth posting a bug report to the pd-gem tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=64325&atid=507079

.hc

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