Re: Freeing memory when quitting Wireshark

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Aug 2, 2011, at 12:21 PM, Alex Lindberg wrote:

> When I quit a custom build of Wireshark (Win32), although the application disappears from the desktop, it remains in 
> memory.

What do you mean "remains in memory"?

Perhaps Windows - which probably means Windows NT these days, with XP and later being the predominant desktop versions 
- doesn't have the same model as UN*X, where

        1) when a process exits, "anonymous" pages in the process address space, as allocated by malloc() and the like, 
simply disappear without having to be explicitly unallocated;

        2) file-backed pages, such as pages from the executable image and dynamically-loaded code (shared libraries, 
etc.), remain in memory (but aren't wired into memory, so they're reused if you use the executable or the 
dynamically-loaded code again and are still in memory, but their page frames can be reused for other purposes);

but I doubt it does.  This means that there is no need to explicitly free memory when Wireshark (or any other program) 
exits - it gets freed (and more quickly than if it were explicitly freed).
___________________________________________________________________________
Sent via:    Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
Archives:    http://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev
Unsubscribe: https://wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev
             mailto:wireshark-dev-request () wireshark org?subject=unsubscribe