Re: CListCtrl memory leak?

Hello all,

This post applies to an application developed under VC++
7.1 under Windows XP.

We have a large, 50-DLL, heavily-threaded, and
GUI-intensive application that makes *extremely* heavy
use of the heap and Boost smart pointers. For weeks, I've
been trying to track down a problem with unbounded memory
growth that occurs when the application is actively
processing. I've been unable to find any memory leaks,
and I've also integrated with a demo version of SmartHeap
SMP to rule out address space fragmentation. Integrating
with SmartHeap did not solve our problem (though it did
boost performance very nicely).

I've been logging the "Private Bytes" counter in perfmon
on overnight runs (with log entries being made once per
minute). I typically come in in the morning to find
linear growth that drops off precipitously at the time I
examine the log. This requires careful explanation, so
let me be as clear as I can. When I leave the app.
running the night before, it is maximized and on top.
When I come in in the morning, I don't touch the app. at
all - I don't close it, minimize it, etc. I merely bring
to the front an already-open Windows Explorer showing the
directory containing the log that perfmon is busy
populating. I double-click the log file, which launches
Excel. The log file is locked (by perfmon), so I tell
Excel to open it read-only. I then plot the data. It's
here that I see the linear growth. Then, I would
typically close Excel but touch nothing else. If I come
back a couple of minutes later (allowing time for a
couple more log entries to be made) and reopen the log, I
see the precipitous dropoff I described earlier. During
none of this have I touched our application.

So, what does the subject of this post, "CListCtrl memory
leak?", have to do with all of this? One of the controls
on our main windows is a CListCtrl. This particular
control gets hit pretty heavily during our active
processing, though we do not allow the number of entries
to grow unbounded. Upon commenting out the one line of
code that inserts entries into this list, our problem
appears to go away.

So, does anybody out there know of any memory-related
problems with CListCtrl?

From the observed behavior I've described, does anybody
have any other ideas on what might be causing our woes?