C++ delete does not free all memory (Windows)

Question

I need help understanding problems with my memory allocation and deallocation on Windows. I'm using VS11 compiler (VS2012 IDE) with latest update at the moment (Update 3 RC).

Problem is: I'm allocating dynamically some memory for a 2-dimensional array and immediately deallocating it. Still, before memory allocation, my process memory usage is 0,3 MB before allocation, on allocation 259,6 MB (expected since 32768 arrays of 64 bit ints (8bytes) are allocated), 4106,8 MB during allocation, but after deallocation memory does not drop to expected 0,3 MB, but is stuck at 12,7 MB. Since I'm deallocating all heap memory I've taken, I've expected memory to be back to 0,3 MB.

This is the code in C++ I'm using:

#include <iostream>
#define SIZE 32768
int main( int argc, char* argv[] ) {
std::getchar();

int ** p_p_dynamic2d = new int*[SIZE];

for(int i=0; i<SIZE; i++){
    p_p_dynamic2d[i] = new int[SIZE];
}   
std::getchar();

for(int i=0; i<SIZE; i++){
    for(int j=0; j<SIZE; j++){
        p_p_dynamic2d[i][j] = j+i;
    }
}

std::getchar();

for(int i=0; i<SIZE; i++) {
    delete [] p_p_dynamic2d[i];
}
delete [] p_p_dynamic2d;

std::getchar();
return 0;
}

Answer 1

I'm sure this is a duplicate, but I'll answer it anyway:

If you are viewing Task Manager size, it will give you the size of the process. If there is no "pressure" (your system has plenty of memory available, and no process is being starved), it makes no sense to reduce a process' virtual memory usage - it's not unusual for a process to grow, shrink, grow, shrink in a cyclical pattern as it allocates when it processes data and then releases the data used in one processing cycle, allocating memory for the next cycle, then freeing it again. If the OS were to "regain" those pages of memory, only to need to give them back to your process again, that would be a waste of processing power (assigning and unassigning pages to a particular process isn't entirely trivial, especially if you can't know for sure who those pages belonged to in the first place, since they need to be "cleaned" [filled with zero or some other constant to ensure the "new owner" can't use the memory for "fishing for old data", such as finding my password stored in the memory]).

Even if the pages are still remaining in the ownership of this process, but not being used, the actual RAM can be used by another process. So it's not a big deal if the pages haven't been released for some time.

Further, in debug mode, the C++ runtime will store "this memory has been deleted" in all memory that goes through delete. This is to help identify "use after free". So, if your application is running in debug mode, then don't expect any freed memory to be released EVER. It will get reused tho'. So if you run your code three times over, it won't grow to three times the size.