Re: Finding memory leaks

[Thomas Aeby <aeby at graeff dot com>]

On Sun, 2004-02-29 at 18:31, Andrew Haley wrote:
> I doubt it.  Do you know what root points to these mystery structures?
> Perhaps they're instances of Class, perhaps something else.

Unfortunately there's no symbol associated with the address in the root
- so it's just some anonymous data structure to me.

Anyway, the structure is:

   root 
     => block of memory (16kBytes) 
     => many small blocks of memory (16-48 Bytes typically)
     => Java object

Of course, this might be my simple marker taking something for a pointer
that isn't actually a pointer. This doesn't explain why they aren't
collected, anyway, then.

> Like I said, we really need s full trace during gc to figure this out.

I agree. Whith my approach I hoped to find malfunctions of my program -
it's not actually worth much for debugging the garbage collector
itself, though it points me to the fact that the garbage collector is
either much more complex than I thought or it is malfunctionning in some
way. Not a very precise statement ... :-(

Hacking gcj in order to get the GC backtracing stuff working is out of
reach for me, however.

Best regards,
Tom
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