It is very easy to use dmalloc with git. Follow the instructions here, http://dmalloc.com/docs/latest/online/dmalloc_4.html But using dmalloc shows a pervasive problem, none of the git commands are cleaning up after themselves. For example I ran a simple command, git-status, and thousands of objects were not freed. Normally this doesn't hurt since exiting the process obviously frees all of the memory. But when programming this way it becomes impossible to tell which leaks were on purpose and which were accidental. To sort this out an #ifdef DMALLOC needs to be created and then code for freeing all of the 'on purpose' leaks needs to be added in an IFDEF right before the process exits. The test scripts can then be modified to ensure that everything is freed when the command exits. I've used this process on several projects I've managed and it is a very good thing to do. Once the new infrastructure is in place leaks can be detected automatically and nipped in the bud before they get out of control. The key to making this work is getting code in place in the #ifdef to free those "on-purpose" leaks. I tried a couple of year ago to add leak detection to Mozilla but Mozilla is way too far gone. There are 10,000 places where things are allocated and not being freed. It is a huge manually intensive task sorting out which of these were on-purpose vs accidental. If Mozilla had followed a discipline of ensuring that nothing was every leaked (by using the scheme above) a lot of recent leak clean up work could have been avoided. I don't know enough about the structure of git to add the cleanups in #ifdefs before exit. People who wrote the commands are going to have to help out with this. diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile index 0a5df7a..426830c 100644 --- a/Makefile +++ b/Makefile @@ -752,7 +752,7 @@ SHELL_PATH_SQ = $(subst ','\'',$(SHELL_PATH)) PERL_PATH_SQ = $(subst ','\'',$(PERL_PATH)) TCLTK_PATH_SQ = $(subst ','\'',$(TCLTK_PATH)) -LIBS = $(GITLIBS) $(EXTLIBS) +LIBS = $(GITLIBS) $(EXTLIBS) -ldmalloc BASIC_CFLAGS += -DSHA1_HEADER='$(SHA1_HEADER_SQ)' \ $(COMPAT_CFLAGS) diff --git a/git-compat-util.h b/git-compat-util.h index 79eb10e..8894c30 100644 --- a/git-compat-util.h +++ b/git-compat-util.h @@ -428,3 +428,5 @@ static inline int strtol_i(char const *s, int base, int *result) } #endif + +#include "dmalloc.h" -- Jon Smirl jonsmirl@xxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
