Approaches to deal with Memory Leaks

Memory leaks can be dealt in three approaches:

• Avoid/Mitigate before they manifest: 
• Code review
• Static Analysis helps in detecting memory leaks even before tests are run.

All memory leaks can't be avoided proactively. Static analysis and code reviews can't be comprehensive due to diminishing returns rule. So, memory leaks creep into the code during initial stages of development as well as in later stages.

This creates the need to detect memory leaks as well as gracefully deal with the memory hogs resulting from unchecked memory leaks. 

• Effectively troubleshoot after they manifest: I have covered various features/tools available in linux to detect kernel space memory leaks & user space memory leaks in separate posts
• Kernel Space memory leak detection: To detect kernel space memory leaks, I used kmemleak in the past. Here are my posts on kmemleak:
• Kernel Memory Leak Detection: kmemleak overview
• kmemleak testing & results
• User space memory leak detection: To detect user space memory leaks, I used Valgrind's memcheck in the past. However, memcheck not only helps in detecting run time memory leaks, but other run time memory errors such as memory corruption, illegal memory operations etc. Here are my posts on Valgrind:
• Valgrind - Overview
• Valgrind's Memcheck: Detect user space run time memory errors
• Valgrind's Memcheck + Valkyrie: Detect user space run time memory errors

  

• Gracefully handle memory hogs resulting from unchecked memory leaks: If a memory leak is neither avoided through static analysis nor dealt with proactively with leak detection tools, memory leaks would eventually lead to memory hogs.

In such a case, the memory hog debugging techniques I discussed in my earlier posts would be handy to track down such unchecked memory leaks: 

        Memory Hog Debugging: Check system level memory accounting in linux 

        Memory Hog debugging: Check kernel memory accounting in linux 

        Memory Hog debugging: Check user space memory accounting in linux 

                OOM (Out of Memory) Killer in Linux 

Hope this helps.