[plug] Does linux have a general garbage collector...

[John Summerfield]

> Thanks heaps everybody for your replies - it's been something that I've been
> curious about for a while.  As a programmer, my programs (while still in
> development) may have the odd memory leak, and was wondering if the ram that
> gets lost can be reclaimed by the system without a reboot - for example, if
> I do several test runs on a program that is still leaking memory, will I
> eventually use up the system's RAM - forcing a reboot.  This answers
> basically tell me that this is not a problem for linux (or unix in general).
> Anyone know if it is a problem for an operating system originating in
> Redmond (my gut instincts suggest it is highly likely - but I have no firm
> evidence on that)

I'm perfectly happy with a program that allocates a work area once and 
never frees it. It's not a leak in that memory does not dribble away over 
time, though if someone called it repeatedly within the one process it 
would.

But then if someone uses a program differently from its intended use....

Note that in this case, fork() and exec() would not leak as a new process 
gets created each time.


-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
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