Understanding the Memory Leak Report

With leak checking turned on, you receive an automatic leak report when the program exits. All possible leaks are reported—provided the program has not been killed using the kill command. The level of detail in the report is controlled by the dbx environment variable rtc_mel_at_exit (see Setting dbx Environment Variables). By default, a nonverbose leak report is generated.

Reports are sorted according to the combined size of the leaks. Actual memory leaks are reported first, followed by possible leaks. The verbose report contains detailed stack trace information, including line numbers and source files whenever they are available.

Both reports include the following information for memory leak errors:

Here is the corresponding nonverbose memory leak report.

Actual leaks report    (actual leaks:    3 total size:    2427 bytes)

 Total      Num of  Leaked      Allocation call stack
 Size       Blocks  Block
                    Address
==========  ====== ==========  =======================================
      1852       2      -      true_leak < true_leak
       575       1    0x22150  true_leak < main

Possible leaks report  (possible leaks:  1  total size:       8 bytes)

 Total      Num of  Leaked      Allocation call stack
 Size       Blocks  Block
                    Address
==========  ====== ==========  =======================================
         8       1    0x219b0  in_block < main

Following is a typical verbose leak report.

Actual leaks report    (actual leaks:         3  total size:    2427 bytes)

Memory Leak (mel):
Found 2 leaked blocks with total size 1852 bytes
At time of each allocation, the call stack was:
    [1] true_leak() at line 220 in "leaks.c"
    [2] true_leak() at line 224 in "leaks.c"

Memory Leak (mel):
Found leaked block of size 575 bytes at address 0x22150
At time of allocation, the call stack was:
    [1] true_leak() at line 220 in "leaks.c"
    [2] main() at line 87 in "leaks.c"

Possible leaks report  (possible leaks:       1  total size:       8 bytes)

Possible memory leak -- address in block (aib):
Found leaked block of size 8 bytes at address 0x219b0
At time of allocation, the call stack was:
    [1] in_block() at line 177 in "leaks.c"
    [2] main() at line 100 in "leaks.c"

Generating a Leak Report

You can ask for a leak report at any time using the showleaks command, which reports new memory leaks since the last showleaks command. For more information, see showleaks Command.

Combining Leaks

Because the number of individual leaks can be very large, runtime checking automatically combines leaks allocated at the same place into a single combined leak report. The decision to combine leaks, or report them individually, is controlled by the number-of-frames-to-match parameter specified by the -match m option on a check -leaks or the -m option of the showleaks command. If the call stack at the time of allocation for two or more leaks matches to m frames to the exact program counter level, these leaks are reported in a single combined leak report.

Consider the following three call sequences:

If all of these blocks lead to memory leaks, the value of m determines whether the leaks are reported as separate leaks or as one repeated leak. If m is 2, Blocks 1 and 2 are reported as one repeated leak because the 2 stack frames above malloc() are common to both call sequences. Block 3 will be reported as a separate leak because the trace for c() does not match the other blocks. For m greater than 2, runtime checking reports all leaks as separate leaks. (The malloc is not shown on the leak report.)

In general, the smaller the value of m, the fewer individual leak reports and the more combined leak reports are generated. The greater the value of m, the fewer combined leak reports and the more individual leak reports are generated.