Re: Wireshark Memory Usage

[Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws () gmail com>]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 2:49 AM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com>
wrote:

> During my investigation into the performance issues with transum I noticed
> an apparent memory leak.  Each time I close and re-open the same 40 MB
> trace file, Wireshark memory usage increases by about 14 MB.  I thought it
> was a problem with my code but decided to check memory usage on the current
> 2.2 release.  I see the same problem:
>
>
>
>
>
> Is this expected or is it a bug?

It's not uncommon to see that.  Whether it's a bug or not would require
more investigation.  But keep in mind a number of factors:

* Wireshark intentionally doesn't free all memory when closing a file -
that memory may be marked as "free" in Wireshark's memory allocator but
kept around for future reuse (at least this was the case with emem; I
suppose wmem is the same)
* Even if Wireshark free()s memory the libc (or whatever it is on Windows)
may not return the memory to the OS for the same reasons as above
* We do run a fairly strict memory leak check on the buildbot - though
that's with tshark and on Linux

___________________________________________________________________________
Sent via:    Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
Archives:    https://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev
Unsubscribe: https://www.wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev
             mailto:wireshark-dev-request () wireshark org?subject=unsubscribe