Re: Does anyone understand Process Viewer?

From:

"Tom Serface" <tom.nospam@camaswood.com>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.mfc

Date:

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 07:54:36 -0800

Message-ID:

<21D6EE8C-5A91-42F5-BE5E-C1C35491466E@microsoft.com>

Here are a few things to try:

Look for all places where you "new" memory (using the Find All
functionality). Sometimes this reveals things you never thought about.
Look at objects allocated and added to arrays. Many of the arrays/vectors
require you to delete the objects before removing them from the array.
Any off by one bugs when removing things from arrays.
Is any memory being allocated in libaries (DLLs) that you may be responsible
to delete?
Look at GDI resources being allocated
Look in the output window after the program exits to see the list of
stranded memory blocks

This program might help you more than the built in one:

http://www.teamcti.com/pview/prcview.htm

Tom

"Alan Williams-Key" <Alan Williams-Key@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:744CE9F6-6D9F-434B-9490-D977BD097FEC@microsoft.com...

I am having problems with my program.

When it runs for any length of time it seems to crash my system. So I
thought, memory leaks. So I started monitoring the heap usage using
Process
Viewer (the one that came with Visual Studio). Sure enough, heap usage was
shown as growing quickly and steadily, so I started looking for the
problem(s) in my code and inserted no end of tracing code to track what
was
going on.

Now here's the odd bit. I finally got to write a function to calculate the
usage by adding all the blocks up as reported by _CrtMemCheckpoint() but
that
wasn't helping me and someone here pointed me in the direction of
heapwalk()
so I wrote another function to add up all the space in used blocks as
reported by heapwalk.

These two functions reported different results. Maybe someone knows why.
But
my real problem is that heapwalk also shows my heap usage increasing but
nothing I cannot explain and here's the odd thing, someone is lying, and I
suspect it is heapwalk!

Here is what happened this morning during three minutes of execution.
heapwalk showed my heap usage as increasing from 288KB (after loading a
lot
of data) to 295KB after 3 minutes of running - a modest increase of 7K.
(not
unexpected as the program dynamically creates objects)

In the same time period, Process Viewer showed my heap usage as changing
from 1380KB to 1508KB, an increase of 128KB.

These two sets of figures bear no relationship to each other whatsover.
Given that the program crashes the whole system after half an hour, my
Link
setting specifies a heap of 2048KB and the Process Viewer figures are in
the
right ballpark for this to be the cause, whereas the heapwalk figures are
nowhere near big enough, I suspect Process Viewer is trying to tell me
something but I don't know what it is as I cannot find any information
about
what it measures and how this differs from heapwalk.

Does anyone know what Process Viewer does? Any ideas what memory my
program
is eating that Process Viewer reports but heapwalk doesn't?

Thanks for any help