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I'm writing a program using SDL and have done quite a bit with it so far. As far as I know I've used SDL_FreeSurface() on every SDL_Surface* I've used, have made sure to use TTF_CloseFont() on all the fonts I've opened with SDL_TTF, and have used SDL_Quit() and TTF_Quit() at the end of the program.
Nevertheless, upon running runtime checker I get a ton of supposed leaks. Am I somehow not freeing memory?
Does your runtime checker give you any more information than that? In other words, what is the runtime checker looking for? It's possible that you are doing something silly, like allocating memory and then pointing the pointer to it somewhere else (you might see something like "unreachable memory" for that). Or it could be that the runtime checker is being overly paranoid. Without seeing what is actually there, vague generalities is the best I can do.
Unfortunately, I only have vague information as well, since I haven't purchased the full version of runtime checker and it doesn't show me very much info. If this helps any, these are some of the leaks I'm getting.
except there's maybe like 75 of them.Quote:
malloc 6 occurance (5040 bytes)
malloc 6 occurance (5554 bytes)
malloc 3 occurance (3072 bytes)
malloc 3 occurance (96 bytes)
malloc (1024 bytes)
malloc (8 bytes)
After running the program a few times, it appears to me that the more surfaces I blit, the larger the supposed leak is. My program is a card game and every time you play a card it obviously has to blit more surfaces. It seems that the more cards I play the more occurances I get. I don't know why blitting surfaces would be causing a leak though, since I free all the surfaces I blit at the end of the program.
I have all the cards in the same image, so each time I blit I use a SDL_Rect object to blit only the section of the image I want. Could there be something wrong with blitting the same image (or different sections of it) time and time again before freeing?
There is always the possibility that the leak is actually internal to the library, which means there isn't a lot you can do about it unless you also get the source code.
The other thing to do is go through the relevant manual pages to check to see if there is any additional 'free' you should be doing.
If you suspect say blitting a Rect, then perhaps create a small and "obviously no leaks" demonstration app that you can upload, which does the same thing over and over.
> malloc 6 occurance (5040 bytes)
Check for loops which run 6 times, or you create 6 instances of something.
Are the sizes related to any image sizes, or any struct sizes?
Can you post some code maybe? It is a while since i used SDL but i dont recall only freeing surfaces at program end, its more something you do as you go along, except maybe the main screen surface, but is suppose if it is continually referring to the one sprite sheet then i suppose it makes sense to keep it constant. I thought there was a return value from SDL_FreeSurface() but checked docs and unfortunately not. Personally i would not use one sheet for the entire deck, unless the image is quite small.Quote:
I free all the surfaces I blit at the end of the program
Thanks for the replies. I figured out the problem on my own by commenting out certain functions and watching what runtime checker said. It turns out that I was repeatedly assigning the same image to a surface in a function which is called frequently, without freeing the surface before each time I reassigned it.
You may want to look into smart pointers.