Version 17 of Why does Tcl leak memory?

Updated 2007-02-01 16:49:35

It doesn't, with rare exceptions.

[Details.]

TCT takes memory leaks [ref] very seriously. Few ever escape into a release, and few known ones survive long.

However, there are at least an order of magnitude more perceived memory leaks. These result mainly from causes such as:

  • mis-measured memory use
  • userland, or application-level, memory leaks.
  • system or underlying language libraries (like libc for the C implementation of Tcl)

An example of what I mean by an application-level memory leak is a failure to clean up such Tcl global variables as the token the http package returns from a getURL invocation.

[More explanation.]

[Pertinent posts [L1 ] [L2 ] by tclguy on Tcl's allocator, high-water marking, ...]


LV Is there a list of known memory leaks in either Tcl 8.4 or 8.5? We regularly see people here on the wiki or in comp.lang.tcl which are trying to track down memory leaks. Sometimes, the code is only a dozen lines of code, and so doesn't look like a coding leak...


EKB 12 Mar 2006 - I have two memory-related questions:

  • Are compiled regular expressions released from memory? If they are, at what point does this happen? (And if not, can I call them up again without recompiling them?)

Lars H: As I recall it, there are at least two places where compiled regular expressions are stored. One is in the Tcl_Obj, and that goes away when the Tcl_Obj does or changes representation. The other is that the regular expression compiler maintains a cache of recently compiled regexps and their compiled form; I think this cache is limited to 20-or-so elements. I don't know if there are any others. EKB - Thanks!

  • Are bindings for a window released from memory when the window is destroyed?

I ask because I'm debugging a tough memory leak, and these are two prime culprits.

If this is the wrong place to put such questions, please send me to the right place. Thanks!

comp.lang.tcl might be a better place to ask.

DKF: Bindings are indeed released, but there are things in Tk which are not. In particular, window names (not the full names, but just the last component of each name) and canvas and text tags (strictly, anything that is a Tk_Uid) are not deleted ever in Tk 8.4. In 8.5, they are per-thread resources, which will mean that you have to dispose with the thread to get rid of them. (You could argue that this is a highly sucky situation, and I wouldn't disagree.)

A workaround for this is to reuse the names of these sorts of things as much as you can. Like that, you just have high-water-mark effects instead of total-cumulative effects, meaning that virtually all programs will settle out at a certain level of usage instead of gobbling up ever more.

EKB Thanks very much. This gives me a lot of promising things to try.


Also of interest: