Still Clueless malloc rant - part deux
Why is it that so many running app grow in memory and only release memory when they quit ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by christop
3. Many possible reasons. Could be that they don't release memory that's no longer needed. Could be they have an ever-growing cache of stuff (cache invalidation is hard). Could be they use exponential reallocations with a growth factor close to or greater than ϕ (see, e.g., math - What is the ideal growth rate for a dynamically allocated array? - Stack Overflow). Could be they just have plain ol' memory leaks.
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free does not necessarily release the memory back to the operating system. Most often it just puts back that memory area in a list of free blocks. These free blocks could be reused for the next calls to malloc.
c - Why free() doesn't really frees memory? - Stack Overflow
