On Sun, 10 Nov 1996 pstecker@netbox.com wrote: > memory allocated by the program upon exiting the program. I have been > yelled at constantly by different people to *ALWAYS* 'free' up anything I > malloc when exiting/quitting a program. Is this really that important? > Or can we trust the OS to truly release all memory we allocate? I > honestly think it would be a hassle to go into the code and have it free > up everything (since theres just so much that needs to be free'd). Is it > worth the effort/time? Pros? Cons? > > Penstar/Patrick Pro: Using a mem allocation tracker and logger such as dmalloc will only prove useful if you free up everything before exiting the program. Memory leaks are hard enough to find in a large codebase and not freeing up everything before you jet only makes debugging and leak tracking that much more impossible. Pro: You know absolutely that your program is releasing its resources back to the OS. Not doing this leaves just a hint of mystery in the mix, though most modern OS handle it quite well, you just can't be sure. Even if there is only a 1 percent chance that all the resources are not being released, why take that chance when you can prevent it? :) Con: Code. More code. Yes, it takes code to free up your character lists, room lists, and object lists. Along with all the plrmail, and board messages, etc. Con: Time. Of course more code means more time in writing it and debugging it and many of us dont have the time to code anything other than 'additions'. Personally I think that I myself should do a 50 / 50 mix of addition code and optimization/cleaning code. In other words, I should be spending just as much time adding new code as I do maintaining and streamlining existing code. Too many times I get drawn off down a different avenue forgetting my original code intentions :) I think, in the long run, it would save me some time and produce much better code. Being the stubborn and impatient fool I am, however, I'll stick to my 80/20 slice. Well there ya have it from my view. Is it worth it? I think so. I did it and I use dmalloc to track memory leaks now if I get suspicious and it works like a charm. It was a necessity to free everything up before I even thought of trying to use dmalloc. Ok. Back to my pizza and coke for breakfast. jtrhone aka vall RoA (plug: roa.sunyit.edu 4000) +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: | | http://cspo.queensu.ca/~fletcher/Circle/list_faq.html | +-----------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/18/00 PST