Date: 1/4/2006
| With the code I talked about in the previous blog entry I've been able to start removing lots of memory leaks from Scribe. I've added the leak check dumping that I talked about. It's so easy to use I'm just amazed and it's so low impact on the software during use. It was inspired somewhat by valgrind's leak check tool, but this is (much?) better in that it's runtime impact is much lower than valgrind. Of course valgrind has memcheck, which I can't compete with.
However there is some work ahead, because to clear the app of leaks you have to exercise the code over and over to get coverage, i.e. all of the paths through the code getting executed. But now that the tools are so good, I'll leave it running for the next few weeks and get the codebase nice and tight with memory. I also want to reduce the block count, as lots of small blocks of memory are inefficent, in that each block has a number of bytes in overhead and takes time to allocate and free. And beyond that it also slows application shutdown because if the app is swapped out to disk and you shut it down, lots of small memory blocks take much longer to free than a few large blocks. Each block has to be read/written to free it, and if it has to be loaded from virtual memory first it takes longer. Yeah? The number one offender in the billions of tiny blocks of memory is the XML parser. So that'll get some string pooling options like the hash table.
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