Updated 2015-11-16 15:24:08 by pooryorick

http://www.purl.org/tcl/home/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/memory.htm

The memory command provides various facilities for debugging Tcl's memory management. It is only available when Tcl is configured to include memory debugging; this is not a default configuration because of the performance penalty involved.

Supported subcommands:
[memory active] file
[memory break_on_malloc] count
[memory info]
[memory init] [on|off]
[memory onexit] file
[memory tag] string
[memory trace] [on|off]
[memory trace_on_at_malloc] count
[memory validate] [on|off]

BAS I'm not an expert on this command, but just recently used it, and it was quite helpful. So I thought I would just jot down some notes for others.

First, you need to have TCL_MEM_DEBUG defined in your tclsh/wish. I was testing an extension, so I also set it in the extension...not sure if that is needed. By setting that option, it gives you the memory command, and also puts guards around any memory allocation.

How I used it, was I would use memory info and memory onexit. memory info will give you a status on memory allocates that were performed (it dumps it to a file). It looks like this:
 total mallocs                   3758
 total frees                     2686
 current packets allocated       1072
 current bytes allocated        75445
 maximum packets allocated       1371
 maximum bytes allocated        91655

memory onexit (and memory active), will give will dump active allocs to a file, and looks like this:
 808ccd0 -  808cd5b      140 @ ../generic/tclCompile.c 1581
 8063910 -  806391b       12 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 290
 808c9e8 -  808c9eb        4 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 267
 808c898 -  808c8af       24 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 261
 808c788 -  808c793       12 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 290
 806b210 -  806b216        7 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 267
 808cde0 -  808cdf7       24 @ ../generic/tclLiteral.c 261
     .
     .
     .

So, if the memory info report showed a very big difference between the mallocs and frees, I would look in the memory onexit report, and grep for any lines that had my extension files in it. It gives the line numbers, so you just need to go the line number, and then figure out why it complaining. Most of my problems were that I was not freeing correctly, so I would just make sure I would free that malloc.

See also edit

Further Reading  edit

What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1, Ullrich Drepper, 2007-09-21
Essential reading on the topic.