Memory State Comparison

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Another technique for locating memory leaks involves taking snapshots of the application's memory state at key points. The CRT library provides a structure type, _CrtMemState, which you can use to store a snapshot of the memory state:

_CrtMemState s1, s2, s3;

To take a snapshot of the memory state at a given point, pass a _CrtMemState structure to the _CrtMemCheckpoint function. This function fills in the structure with a snapshot of the current memory state:

_CrtMemCheckpoint( &s1 );

You can dump the contents of a _CrtMemState structure at any point by passing the structure to the _CrtMemDumpStatistics function:

_CrtMemDumpStatistics( &s1 );

This function prints a dump of memory allocation information that looks like this:

0 bytes in 0 Free Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Normal Blocks.
3071 bytes in 16 CRT Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Ignore Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Client Blocks.
Largest number used: 3071 bytes.
Total allocations: 3764 bytes.

To determine whether a memory leak has occurred in a section of code, you can take snapshots of the memory state before and after the section, and then use _CrtMemDifference to compare the two states:

_CrtMemCheckpoint( &s1 );
// memory allocations take place here
_CrtMemCheckpoint( &s2 );

if ( _CrtMemDifference( &s3, &s1, &s2) )
   _CrtMemDumpStatistics( &s3 );

As the name implies, _CrtMemDifference compares two memory states (s1 and s2) and produces a result (s3) that is the difference of the two states. Placing _CrtMemCheckpoint calls at the beginning and end of your program and using _CrtMemDifference to compare the results provides another way to check for memory leaks. If a leak is detected, you can use _CrtMemCheckpoint calls to divide your program and locate the leak using binary search technique.

See Also

Concepts

Memory Leak Detection and Isolation