Method and computer programming product for detecting memory leaks

• US 8,504,996 B2
• Filed: 06/20/2007
• Issued: 08/06/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 06/22/2006
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Dspace GmbH
• Original Assignee: Dspace Digital Signal Processing And Control Engineering Gmbh
• Inventors: Zagatta, Gunther
• Primary Examiner(s): Das, Chameli
• Application Number:
  US11/765,911
• Publication Number:
  US 20080072007A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,239 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 717/131
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3668 Software testing software testing in telephone exchanges H04M3/242, testing of hardware G06F11/22
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 12/023 Free address space management

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for detecting memory leaks produced by a program running on a computer, wherein during a program run, for each allocation of a memory region at least one information item concerning the performed allocation is entered in an allocation list and a check is made as to whether the allocation list contains a stored reference pattern of information that is typical for one or more memory leaks, and after a stored reference pattern is found the program run is paused, or a memory leak thus detected is associated with the region of the running program whose processing resulted in the most recent entry in the allocation list. The invention further relates to a computer programming product which carries out the method when the computer program is executed on a computer.

Claims

1. A method for detecting memory leaks produced by a computer program running on a computer comprising,

creating a first memory leak list that records memory allocations that were not de-allocated after a first run of the computer program, wherein the list records the position of each such memory allocation and its size;

creating a second memory leak list that records memory allocations that were not de-allocated after the second run of the computer program, wherein the list records the position of each such memory allocation and its size;

creating a stored reference pattern list by identifying consecutive entries on the first and second memory leak lists that correspond to one another;

during a third run of the computer program using the stored reference pattern list to detect the portions of the computer program that created the memory leak;

wherein the stored reference pattern list records lengths of memory leaks together with their respective relative distances are entered, and in which entries are provided therebetween for memory allocations that did not result in a leak.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the detection comprises recording a source code function that created the detected memory leak.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the detection comprises pausing the running of the program at the point where the detected memory leak is allocated.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein found correspondences are discarded as a contribution to the stored reference pattern list when a memory leak distance exceeds a limit value.

5. The method according to claim 1 wherein the detection is based on memory allocation patterns in agreement with the stored reference list which are found in a memory region of the computer on which the program is running and are further stored in a memory region of the registry, whereby only patterns containing more than one memory leak are stored.

6. The method according to claim 1 wherein a sequence of number pairs is stored as the stored reference pattern list, each pair comprising a number which indicates the relative distance between two memory leaks providing the position, and a number which indicates the length of a memory leak providing the size.

7. The method according to claim 1 wherein the size of the memory leak is recorded as a length of each allocated memory region is entered in the first and second memory leak lists.