If you malloc/calloc/realloc without a free you will leak memory. Do you have some reason to believe that another module might prevent your module's calls to free() from being run? What do you have in mind specifically?
You can also mimic realloc by just allocating more memory from the pool and calling memcpy. The old memory will leak into the pool but be resolved on pool cleanup. I can tell you that malloc/free works fine inside an Apache module: mod_pagespeed is written in C++ and uses new/delete extensively with the default underlying malloc/free implementation. We load-test extensively and watch for leaks carefully via top, in addition to running valgrind on small system tests. This methodology is sound. I'm not sure why you think your calls to free would not happen. -Josh On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Christoph Gröver <gro...@sitepark.com>wrote: > > Hello list, > > In a module I have to allocate and reallocate a chunk of memory. > Because (AFAIK) Apache or its libraries do not support reallocation > I use the standard functions malloc/realloc (and free), of course. > > But what if there's a problem in another module? > > Is it possible that due to some errors somewhere else the > malloc/realloc of my modules are run (and therefor memory is allocated) > but the corresponding free is not called, because the thread/process > had a strange ending. > > So would this result in a memory leak? (if this happens often!) > > Hope you can enlight me on this topic. > > Bye, > > -- > Christoph Gröver, gro...@sitepark.com > >
