Looking for Memory Leak Advice

[complete]

Apart from buying BoundsChecker or any of the other tools to track down memory leaks. Does anyone have any advice or tips from your years of programming experience to offer on how to track down the causes of memory leaks?

I find that the big dump that happens at the end of a program does not typically lend any useful clues as to where or what was allocated that was not freed. I find that I have to back track and comment out sections of code until through the process of elimination and trial-and-error, I am able to narrow down where the problem is. And since this is usually at the bottom of the To-Do list, the memory leaks are not plugged.

[teknomage1]

Now obviously I don't know what sort of allocation strategy your program uses or what's appropriate for your problem domain, but you could try making some of your objects reference counted. Boost::SmartPointer is pretty good.

[complete]

Originally Posted by teknomage1

Now obviously I don't know what sort of allocation strategy your program uses or what's appropriate for your problem domain, but you could try making some of your objects reference counted. Boost::SmartPointer is pretty good.

Using some sort of smart pointer is something I will try when all else fails.

The Memory Dump that happens at the end of running the program (It is a Visual C++ MFC program) shows memory locations. I understand I can use this to find where the offending allocation happens. But the memory addresses change each time I run the program -- althought the sizes do not, but this does not give me enough clues.

I wonder if this is just an unavoidable "feature" of MFC.

[DJMaze]

Totally depends who forgets to cleanup something?

When you use

CString *foo = new CString();

but forget to

if (foo) delete foo;

or use

int *integers = new int[20];

but forget to

delete [] integers;

Then it's your fault, else it could be from a library that you use (.NET fun anyone?).

[complete]

Also, I have learned that you need to have a
CoUnitialize()
to go along with every
CoInitailze(0)

I wonder if I need something to go along with my CoCreateInstance calls.

[complete]

Originally Posted by DJMaze

Totally depends who forgets to cleanup something?

When you use

CString *foo = new CString();

but forget to

if (foo) delete foo;

or use

int *integers = new int[20];

but forget to

delete [] integers;

Then it's your fault, else it could be from a library that you use (.NET fun anyone?).

If I have something like this:

  BSTR val;
  SomeFunction(&val);

Will I have to free val somehow?