Question

Visual studio 2008 application using C++ under windows XP.

Any useful advices beyond the “always delete new objects” advice?

Edit: Actually I am looking for some programming advices.

Answer 1

Depends what you mean by “consumes too much memory”.

A) By design i.e. it requires to load or generate large data structures that you expect to cause problems.

In this case is it i) too much phyical memory i.e. it becomes slow because the hard drive starts swapping pages in and out or ii) too much address space i.e. it fails to allocate because it can’t find a hole in the memory?

For ii) consider using 64bit builds, consider using shared memory to store large data structures, beware of fragmentation – allocate large buffers early, break up large data structures into smaller ones

B) It surprises you by using loads of memory.

Find your leaks or bugs – various profilers available or visual studio built in debug alloc hooks. Do you have any broken arithmetic for calculating buffer sizes(especially accidental int wrap around)?

Use smart pointers to manage deletion.