LEAKPOINT: pinpointing the causes of memory leaks

  • Authors:

  • James Clause;Alessandro Orso

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology;Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Most existing leak detection techniques for C and C++ applications only detect the existence of memory leaks. They do not provide any help for fixing the underlying memory management errors. In this paper, we present a new technique that not only detects leaks, but also points developers to the locations where the underlying errors may be fixed. Our technique tracks pointers to dynamically-allocated areas of memory and, for each memory area, records several pieces of relevant information. This information is used to identify the locations in an execution where memory leaks occur. To investigate our technique's feasibility and usefulness, we developed a prototype tool called LEAKPOINT and used it to perform an empirical evaluation. The results of this evaluation show that LEAKPOINT detects at least as many leaks as existing tools, reports zero false positives, and, most importantly, can be effective at helping developers fix the underlying memory management errors.