Question

I don’t use dynamic memory allocation (except for 3 lines in which i do static A* a = new… but that only happens once)…and yet when I run for several iterations memory usage as seen via top(1) seems to increase with number of iterations..I set a breakpoint with a high ignore count and then examined internal data structures to make sure they were not growing (most of my state is in a vector< vector >) but they get recycled and all entries were vectors of size/capacity 100 (the initial default) even after a while.

What are some ways in which I can investigate the growing memory trace maybe using gdb or anything else?

Answer 1

If you are on Linux, you can use the wonderful Valgrind tool. Install it, compile your program with -g flag, and run

$ valgrind ./my_prog

And read the log it prints for you, there you will see a summary of your memory usage and instructions on how to get even more info.