Strategy or tools to find "non-leak" memory usage problems in Delphi?

Question

One old application started to consume memory a lot after server update. Memory usage seems to rise with out limit until program hangs.

According to FastMM4 and EurekaLog, there's no memory leak (except 28 bytes), so I assume all memory is freed when application is shutdown.

Are there any tools or strategies suitable for tracking this kind of memory problem?

Answer 1

Since September 2012, there is a very simple and comfortable way to find this type of "run-time only" memory leaks.

FastMM4991 introduced a new method, LogMemoryManagerStateToFile:

Added the LogMemoryManagerStateToFile call. This call logs a summary of the memory manager state to file: The total allocated memory, overhead, efficiency, and a breakdown of allocated memory by class and string type. This call may be useful to catch objects that do not necessarily leak, but do linger longer than they should.

To discover the leak at run time, you only need these steps

1. add a call to LogMemoryManagerStateToFile('memory.log', '') in a place where it will be called in intervals
2. run the application
3. open the log file with a tail program (for example BareTail), which will auto-refresh when the file content changes
4. watch the first lines of the file, they will contain the memory allocations which occupy the highest amount of memory
5. if you see a class or memory type constantly has a growing number of instances, this can be the reason of your leak