Memory stability of a C++ application in Linux

Question

I want to verify the memory stability of a C++ application I wrote and compiled for Linux. It is a network application that responds to remote clients connectings in a rate

Answer 1

Use valgrind to find memory leaks : valgrind ./your_application

It will list where you allocated memory and did not free it.

I don't think it's a linux problem, but in your application. If you monitor the memory usage with « top » you won't get very precise usages. Try using massif (a tool of valgrind) : valgrind --tool=massif ./your_application to know the real memory usage.

As a more general rule to avoid leaks in C++ : use smart pointers instead of normal pointers. Also in many situations, you can use RAII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization) instead of allocating memory with "new".