Memory Leak (David Estes-Smargiassi) Mac OS

Memory leaks are blocks of allocated memory that the program no longer references. Leaks waste space by filling up pages of memory with inaccessible data and waste time due to extra paging activity. Leaked memory eventually forces the system to allocate additional virtual memory pages for the application, the allocation of which could have been avoided by reclaiming the leaked memory.

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Sep 27, 2017 How to free up memory on Mac Tip # 1. Remove Login Items to lower Mac memory usage. Login items are programs that load automatically upon Mac startup. Some of them covertly add themselves to the list and this is no good. If you’re looking to free up RAM, they are the first candidates for deletion. When programs perform tasks on OS X and other platforms, chunks of memory are allocated for their needs, but these should be relinquished when the task is done. If not, then a memory leak may occur, where progressively more memory is reserved (sometimes at a rapid rate), until the system cannot allocate anymore and is strained for resources. Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz Number Of Processors: 1 Total Number Of Cores: 2 L2 Cache: 6 MB Memory: 4 GB Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz System Version: Mac OS X 10.6.3 (10D573) Kernel Version: Darwin 10.3.0.

For apps that use malloc, memory leaks are bugs and should always be fixed. For apps that use only Objective-C objects, the compiler’s ARC feature deallocates objects for you and generally avoids the problem of memory leaks. However, apps that mix the use of Objective-C objects and C-based structures must manage the ownership of objects more directly to ensure that the objects are not leaked.

The malloc library can only reclaim the memory you tell it to reclaim. If you call malloc or any routine that allocates memory, you must balance that call with a corresponding free. A typical memory leak occurs when you forget to deallocate memory for a pointer embedded in a data structure. If you allocate memory for embedded pointers in your code, make sure you release the memory for that pointer prior to deallocating the data structure itself.

Another typical memory leak example occurs when you allocate memory, assign it to a pointer, and then assign a different value to the pointer without freeing the first block of memory. In this example, overwriting the address in the pointer erases the reference to the original block of memory, making it impossible to release.

Finding Leaks Using Instruments

The Instruments application can be used to find leaks in both OS X and iPhone applications. To find leaks, create a new document template in Instruments and add the Leaks instrument to it. The Leaks instrument provides leak-detection capabilities identical to those in the leaks command-line tool. The Leaks instrument records all allocation events that occur in your application and then periodically searches the application’s writable memory, registers, and stack for references to any active memory blocks. If it does not find a reference to a block in one of these places, it deems the block a “leak” and displays the relevant information in the Detail pane.

In the Detail pane, you can view leaked memory blocks using Table and Outline modes. In Table mode, Instruments displays the complete list of leaked blocks, sorted by size. Selecting an entry in the table and clicking the arrow button next to the memory address shows the allocation history for the memory block at that address. Selecting an entry from this allocation history then shows the stack trace for that event in the Extended Detail pane of the document window. In Outline mode, the Leaks instrument displays leaks organized by call tree, which you can use to get information about the leaks in a particular branch of your code.

For more information about using the Instruments application, including more information about the information displayed by the Leaks instrument, see Instruments User Guide.

Using the leaks Tool

In OS X, the leaks command-line tool searches the virtual memory space of a process for buffers that were allocated by malloc but are no longer referenced. For each leaked buffer it finds, leaks displays the following information:

• the address of the leaked memory

• the size of the leak (in bytes)

• the contents of the leaked buffer

If leaks can determine that the object is an instance of an Objective-C or Core Foundation object, it also displays the name of the object. If you do not want to view the contents of each leaked buffer, you can specify the -nocontext option when calling leaks. If the MallocStackLogging environment variable is set and you are running your application in gdb, leaks displays a stack trace describing where the buffer was allocated. For more information on malloc debugging options, see Enabling the Malloc Debugging Features.

Note: The leaks command-line tool is located in /usr/bin.

Tips for Improving Leak Detection

The following guidelines can help you find memory leaks quickly in your program. Most of these guidelines are intended to be used with the leaks tool but some are also applicable for general use.

• Run leaks during unit testing. Because unit testing exercises all code paths in a repeatable manner, you are more likely to find leaks than you would be if you were testing your code in a production environment.

• Use the -exclude option of leaks to filter out leaks in functions with known memory leaks. This option helps reduce the amount of extraneous information reported by leaks.

• If leaks reports a leak intermittently, set up a loop around the target code path and run the code hundreds or thousands of times. This increases the likelihood of the leak reappearing more regularly.

• Run your program against libgmalloc.dylib in gdb. This library is an aggressive debugging malloc library that can help track down insidious bugs in your code. For more information, see the libgmalloc man page.

• For Cocoa and iPhone applications, if you fix a leak and your program starts crashing, your code is probably trying to use an already-freed object or memory buffer. Set the NSZombieEnabled environment variable to YES to find messages to already freed objects.

Most unit testing code executes the desired code paths and exits. Although this is perfectly normal for unit testing, it creates a problem for the leaks tool, which needs time to analyze the process memory space. To fix this problem, you should make sure your unit-testing code does not exit immediately upon completing its tests. You can do this by putting the process to sleep indefinitely instead of exiting normally.

Copyright © 2003, 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Policy Updated: 2013-04-23

Memory Leak (david Estes-smargiassi) Mac Os Download

Historically, the classic Mac OS used a form of memory management that has fallen out of favor in modern systems. Criticism of this approach was one of the key areas addressed by the change to Mac OS X.

The original problem for the engineers of the Macintosh was how to make optimum use of the 128 KB of RAM with which the machine was equipped, on Motorola 68000-based computer hardware that did not support virtual memory.^[1] Since at that time the machine could only run one application program at a time, and there was no fixedsecondary storage, the engineers implemented a simple scheme which worked well with those particular constraints. That design choice did not scale well with the development of the machine, creating various difficulties for both programmers and users.

Fragmentation[edit]

The primary concern of the original engineers appears to have been fragmentation – that is, the repeated allocation and deallocation of memory through pointers leading to many small isolated areas of memory which cannot be used because they are too small, even though the total free memory may be sufficient to satisfy a particular request for memory. To solve this, Apple engineers used the concept of a relocatable handle, a reference to memory which allowed the actual data referred to be moved without invalidating the handle. Apple's scheme was simple – a handle was simply a pointer into a (non-relocatable) table of further pointers, which in turn pointed to the data.^[2] If a memory request required compaction of memory, this was done and the table, called the master pointer block, was updated. The machine itself implemented two areas in memory available for this scheme – the system heap (used for the OS), and the application heap.^[3] As long as only one application at a time was run, the system worked well. Since the entire application heap was dissolved when the application quit, fragmentation was minimized.

The memory management system had weaknesses; the system heap was not protected from errant applications, as would have been possible if the system architecture had supported memory protection, and this was frequently the cause of system problems and crashes.^[4] In addition, the handle-based approach also opened up a source of programming errors, where pointers to data within such relocatable blocks could not be guaranteed to remain valid across calls that might cause memory to move. This was a real problem for almost every system API that existed. Because of the transparency of system-owned data structures at the time, the APIs could do little to solve this. Thus the onus was on the programmer not to create such pointers, or at least manage them very carefully by dereferencing all handles after every such API call. Since many programmers were not generally familiar with this approach, early Mac programs suffered frequently from faults arising from this.^[5]

Palm OS and 16-bit Windows use a similar scheme for memory management, but the Palm and Windows versions make programmer error more difficult. For instance, in Mac OS, to convert a handle to a pointer, a program just de-references the handle directly, but if the handle is not locked, the pointer can become invalid quickly. Calls to lock and unlock handles are not balanced; ten calls to HLock are undone by a single call to HUnlock.^[6] In Palm OS and Windows, handles are an opaque type and must be de-referenced with MemHandleLock on Palm OS or Global/LocalLock on Windows. When a Palm or Windows application is finished with a handle, it calls MemHandleUnlock or Global/LocalUnlock. Palm OS and Windows keep a lock count for blocks; after three calls to MemHandleLock, a block will only become unlocked after three calls to MemHandleUnlock.

Addressing the problem of nested locks and unlocks can be straightforward (although tedious) by employing various methods, but these intrude upon the readability of the associated code block and require awareness and discipline on the part of the coder.

Memory leaks and stale references[edit]

Awareness and discipline are also necessary to avoid memory 'leaks' (failure to deallocate within the scope of the allocation) and to avoid references to stale handles after release (which usually resulted in a hard crash—annoying on a single-tasking system, potentially disastrous if other programs are running).

Switcher[edit]

The situation worsened with the advent of Switcher, which was a way for a Mac with 512KB or more of memory to run multiple applications at once.^[7] This was a necessary step forward for users, who found the one-app-at-a-time approach very limiting. Because Apple was now committed to its memory management model, as well as compatibility with existing applications, it was forced to adopt a scheme where each application was allocated its own heap from the available RAM.^[8]The amount of actual RAM allocated to each heap was set by a value coded into the metadata of each application, set by the programmer. Sometimes this value wasn't enough for particular kinds of work, so the value setting had to be exposed to the user to allow them to tweak the heap size to suit their own requirements. While popular among 'power users', this exposure of a technical implementation detail was against the grain of the Mac user philosophy. Apart from exposing users to esoteric technicalities, it was inefficient, since an application would be made to grab all of its allotted RAM, even if it left most of it subsequently unused. Another application might be memory starved, but would be unable to utilize the free memory 'owned' by another application.^[3]

While an application could not beneficially utilize a sister application's heap, it could certainly destroy it, typically by inadvertently writing to a nonsense address. An application accidentally treating a fragment of text or image, or an unassigned location as a pointer could easily overwrite the code or data of other applications or even the OS, leaving 'lurkers' even after the program was exited. Such problems could be extremely difficult to analyze and correct.

Switcher evolved into MultiFinder in System 4.2, which became the Process Manager in System 7, and by then the scheme was long entrenched. Apple made some attempts to work around the obvious limitations – temporary memory was one, where an application could 'borrow' free RAM that lay outside of its heap for short periods, but this was unpopular with programmers so it largely failed to solve the problems. Apple's System 7 Tune-up addon added a 'minimum' memory size and a 'preferred' size—if the preferred amount of memory was not available, the program could launch in the minimum space, possibly with reduced functionality. This was incorporated into the standard OS starting with System 7.1, but still did not address the root problem.^[9]

Virtual memory schemes, which made more memory available by paging unused portions of memory to disk, were made available by third-party utilities like Connectix Virtual, and then by Apple in System 7. This increased Macintosh memory capacity at a performance cost, but did not add protected memory or prevent the memory manager's heap compaction that would invalidate some pointers.

32-bit clean[edit]

Originally the Macintosh had 128 kB of RAM, with a limit of 512 kB. This was increased to 4 MB upon the introduction of the Macintosh Plus. These Macintosh computers used the 68000 CPU, a 32-bit processor, but only had 24 physical address lines. The 24 lines allowed the processor to address up to 16 MB of memory (2²⁴ bytes), which was seen as a sufficient amount at the time. The RAM limit in the Macintosh design was 4 MB of RAM and 4 MB of ROM, because of the structure of the memory map.^[10] This was fixed by changing the memory map with the Macintosh II and the Macintosh Portable, allowing up to 8 MB of RAM.

Because memory was a scarce resource, the authors of the Mac OS decided to take advantage of the unused byte in each address. The original Memory Manager (up until the advent of System 7) placed flags in the high 8 bits of each 32-bit pointer and handle. Each address contained flags such as 'locked', 'purgeable', or 'resource', which were stored in the master pointer table. When used as an actual address, these flags were masked off and ignored by the CPU.^[4]

While a good use of very limited RAM space, this design caused problems when Apple introduced the Macintosh II, which used the 32-bit Motorola 68020 CPU. The 68020 had 32 physical address lines which could address up to 4 GB (2³² bytes) of memory. The flags that the Memory Manager stored in the high byte of each pointer and handle were significant now, and could lead to addressing errors.

In theory, the architects of the Macintosh system software were free to change the 'flags in the high byte' scheme to avoid this problem, and they did. For example, on the Macintosh IIci and later machines, HLock() and other APIs were rewritten to implement handle locking in a way other than flagging the high bits of handles. But many Macintosh application programmers and a great deal of the Macintosh system software code itself accessed the flags directly rather than using the APIs, such as HLock(), which had been provided to manipulate them. By doing this they rendered their applications incompatible with true 32-bit addressing, and this became known as not being '32-bit clean'.

In order to stop continual system crashes caused by this issue, System 6 and earlier running on a 68020 or a 68030 would force the machine into 24-bit mode, and would only recognize and address the first 8 megabytes of RAM, an obvious flaw in machines whose hardware was wired to accept up to 128 MB RAM – and whose product literature advertised this capability. With System 7, the Mac system software was finally made 32-bit clean, but there were still the problem of dirty ROMs. The problem was that the decision to use 24-bit or 32-bit addressing has to be made very early in the boot process, when the ROM routines initialized the Memory Manager to set up a basic Mac environment where NuBus ROMs and disk drivers are loaded and executed. Older ROMs did not have any 32-bit Memory Manager support and so was not possible to boot into 32-bit mode. Surprisingly, the first solution to this flaw was published by software utility company Connectix, whose 1991 product MODE32 reinitialized the Memory Manager and repeated early parts of the Mac boot process, allowing the system to boot into 32-bit mode and enabling the use of all the RAM in the machine. Apple licensed the software from Connectix later in 1991 and distributed it for free. The Macintosh IIci and later Motorola based Macintosh computers had 32-bit clean ROMs.

It was quite a while before applications were updated to remove all 24-bit dependencies, and System 7 provided a way to switch back to 24-bit mode if application incompatibilities were found.^[3] By the time of migration to the PowerPC and System 7.1.2, 32-bit cleanliness was mandatory for creating native applications and even later Motorola 68040 based Macs could not support 24-bit mode.^[6][11]

Object orientation[edit]

Memory Leak (david Estes-smargiassi) Mac Os Download

The rise of object-oriented languages for programming the Mac – first Object Pascal, then later C++ – also caused problems for the memory model adopted. At first, it would seem natural that objects would be implemented via handles, to gain the advantage of being relocatable. These languages, as they were originally designed, used pointers for objects, which would lead to fragmentation issues. A solution, implemented by the THINK (later Symantec) compilers, was to use Handles internally for objects, but use a pointer syntax to access them. This seemed a good idea at first, but soon deep problems emerged, since programmers could not tell whether they were dealing with a relocatable or fixed block, and so had no way to know whether to take on the task of locking objects or not. Needless to say this led to huge numbers of bugs and problems with these early object implementations. Later compilers did not attempt to do this, but used real pointers, often implementing their own memory allocation schemes to work around the Mac OS memory model.

Memory Leak (david Estes-smargiassi) Mac Os -

While the Mac OS memory model, with all its inherent problems, remained this way right through to Mac OS 9, due to severe application compatibility constraints, the increasing availability of cheap RAM meant that by and large most users could upgrade their way out of a corner. The memory was not used efficiently, but it was abundant enough that the issue never became critical. This is ironic given that the purpose of the original design was to maximise the use of very limited amounts of memory. Mac OS X finally did away with the whole scheme, implementing a modern sparse virtual memory scheme. A subset of the older memory model APIs still exists for compatibility as part of Carbon, but maps to the modern memory manager (a thread-safe malloc implementation) underneath.^[6] Apple recommends that Mac OS X code use malloc and free 'almost exclusively'.^[12]

References[edit]

1. ^Hertzfeld, Andy (September 1983), The Original Macintosh: We're Not Hackers!, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
2. ^Hertzfeld, Andy (January 1982), The Original Macintosh: Hungarian, archived from the original on June 19, 2010, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^ ^abcmemorymanagement.org (December 15, 2000), Memory management in Mac OS, archived from the original on May 16, 2010, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
4. ^ ^abHertzfeld, Andy, The Original Macintosh: Mea Culpa, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
5. ^Apple Computer (October 1, 1985), Technical Note OV09: Debugging With PurgeMem and CompactMem, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^ ^abcLegacy Memory Manager Reference, Apple Inc., June 27, 2007, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
7. ^Hertzfeld, Andy (October 1984), The Original Macintosh: Switcher, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^Mindfire Solutions (March 6, 2002), Memory Management in Mac OS(PDF), p. 2, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
9. ^'System 7.1 upgrade guide'(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on March 4, 2016. Retrieved May 26, 2015.
10. ^'memory maps'. Osdata.com. March 28, 2001. Retrieved May 11, 2010.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
11. ^Apple Computer (January 1, 1991), Technical Note ME13: Memory Manager Compatibility, retrieved May 10, 2010CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
12. ^Memory Allocation Recommendations on OS X, Apple Inc, July 12, 2005, retrieved September 22, 2009CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

External links[edit]

• Macintosh: ROM Size for Various Models, Apple Inc, August 23, 2000, retrieved September 22, 2009CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Memory Leak (david Estes-smargiassi) Mac Os Version

Memory Leak (David Estes-Smargiassi) Mac OS