[linrad] Re: Memory leakage

["Joseph B. Fitzgerald" <alum.WPI.EDU; jfitzgerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>What is the meaning of "lost memory" ? Is it a part of
>memory space that will eventually be swapped to disk?
>Presumably there is no owner to it, will it just
>accumulate until the next reboot ?

In valgrind's terminology, "lost memory" is synonymous with a "memory
leak" - memory which has been malloc'ed but not free'ed.  In general, the
operating system will reclaim this memory when the program terminates -
you do not necessarily need to wait until the next reboot. 

 That being said, it might be possible for you to ask (possibly
indirectly) X to allocate memory and then linrad could exit and leave X
"holding the bag" so to speak.   In that case, the memory might not be
reclaimed until X is restarted.  I am not particularly familiar with X
programming, but that can be an issue with libraries in general.   Once, I
missed a note buried deep in the comments of a header file.  It read
something like:

/*pointer pBlarg allocated by foo(), you must free this with free()*/

That cost me a week of debugging time!  There could be some similar
documentation for an X library function.

There is a  nice article at
http://www.o-hand.com/~iain/valgrind-gtkhtml.html which may shed some
light on the subject.

-Joe KM1P

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