Analyzing dumps

The dump of unreferenced buffers prints out one line of information for each unreferenced buffer. The information provided for a buffer includes:

File and line information is available if the call to allocate the buffer was made using one of the library's debug interfaces. Otherwise, the return address of the call is reported in place of the line number. In some circumstances, no return address information is available. This usually indicates that the call was made from a function with no frame information, such as the system libraries. In such cases, the entry can usually be ignored and probably isn't a leak.

From the way tracing is performed, we can see that some leaks may escape detection and may not be reported in the output. This happens if the root set or a reachable buffer in the heap has something that looks like a pointer to the buffer.

Likewise, each reported leak should be checked against the suspected code identified by the line or call return address information. If the code in question keeps interior pointers — pointers to a location inside the buffer, rather than the start of the buffer — the trace operation will likely fail to find a reference to the buffer. In this case, the buffer may well not be a leak. In other cases, there is almost certainly a memory leak.