Very Computer

Hi!

I have a question about memory usage/freeing of applications running unter
AIX.

First, let me describe my situation: I have written a server application,
which forks a new process for each client session. It's written in Pascal,
so the Pascal runtime library is also involved. The child processes request
some memory dynamically with "new", but they don't "dispose" those pointers,
before their termination. During runtime, I monitor my system's memory with
svmon, looking for the usage of real memory and paging space. What I can
see, is, that both usages (and especially real memory) are increasing by
every fork. But after termination of the child processes, usage will not go
down the same size as it was increasing before. So, by the time (forking and
terminating some childs), the memory consumption is constantly increasing.

Now my question: When the child process terminates, isn't the system
responsible for freeing all the used memory of this process? Is it possible,
that some of the child's memory is still marked as used, until the father
process also terminates? How does AIX handle all this, is there a
documentation about this online (I already browsed all information within
InfoExplorer)?

Thanks a lot in advance.

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Posted from mail.Space.Net [195.30.0.8]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG

A shot in the dark, but is the "runtime" allocating memory with each fork
and not releasing it? Also, the "runtime" could have a memory leak.

There was an interesting discussion going on in comp.unix.internals the last
couple of days on memory allocation/deallocation. I'm cross-posting there as
well to see if the memory gurus want to take a stab at this.

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Urban A. Haas
CEO - Urban Technology, Inc.
Minneapolis, MN  USA
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