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Plugging leaky memory
Just because a language has garbage collection doesn't mean you still can't
leak memory—you can easily leak memory, since quite a few modern langauges
that have garbage collection have ways of calling into libraries written in
C, and those can leak.
With that said, reading “Tracking down a memory leak in Ruby's EventMachine
[1] (link via Hacker News [2]) was quite informative. Looking for patterns in
the leaked memory as a means of tracking down what was being leaked was
brilliant (“Well, as mentioned, 95+% of our program’s memory footprint is
leaked objects. So if we just take a random sample of bits of memory, we will
find leaked objects with very good probability.”). And I did not know you
could call C functions from within gdb.
This is something I'll have to keep in mind for work.
[1]
http://blog.nelhage.com/2013/03/tracking-an-eventmachine-leak/
[2]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5338761
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