Question

I am reading CUDA By Example and I found that when they introduced events, they called cudaEventDestroy for each event they created.

However I noticed that some later examples neglected this cleanup function. Are there any undesirable side-effects of forgetting to destroy created events and streams (i.e. like a memory leak when you forget to free allocated memory)?

Answer 1

Any resources the app is still holding at the time it exits will be automatically free’ed by the OS / drivers. So, if the app creates only a limited number of events, it is not strictly necessary to free them manually. Still, letting the app exit without freeing all resources on purpose is bad practice because it becomes hard to distinguish between genuine leaks and “on purpose” leaks.