Debugging memory leaks

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 11:53 PM, rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 14, 1:15 am, Giorgos Tzampanakis
> <giorgos.tzampana... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Am I the only one who thinks this is terrible advice?
>
> I would expect a typical desktop app to run for a couple of hours --
> maybe a couple of days.
> Living with a small (enough) leak there may be ok.
> [In particular I believe that most commercial apps will leak a bit if
> run long enough]
>
> The case of something server-ish is quite different.
> A server in principle runs forever.
> And so if it leaks its not working.

I keep my clients running for months. My Windows laptop (let's not
even get started on my Linux boxes) got rebooted a few weeks ago
(can't remember why), but I've had it running for two months or more
at a time. And that's Windows XP, not the most stable OS ever
invented, and a computer that's used fairly constantly - two web
browsers, a MUD client that retains full history, music/movie playing
with VLC, SciTE, IDLE, BitTorrent, and a bunch of other stuff. And I
don't reboot it; I don't even restart applications if I can help it
(except VLC, I tend to close that when I'm done). Any memory leak in
any of the apps I use would be highly visible and extremely annoying;
and there *were* such leaks in the Flash players of yesterday.
Fortunately now I can leave browsers running constantly. (Either that,
or the plugins container gets restarted. Not sure.)

Just because it's a client doesn't mean it can't be treated seriously. :)

Of course, my style IS unusual. Most people don't do what I do.

ChrisA