$Id: README.memoryleak,v 1.3 2003/07/22 10:00:37 bagder Exp $ _ _ ____ _ ___| | | | _ \| | / __| | | | |_) | | | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| How To Track Down Suspected Memory Leaks in libcurl =================================================== Single-threaded Please note that this memory leak system is not adjusted to work in more than one thread. If you want/need to use it in a multi-threaded app. Please adjust accordingly. Build Rebuild libcurl with -DCURLDEBUG (usually, rerunning configure with --enable-debug fixes this). 'make clean' first, then 'make' so that all files actually are rebuilt properly. It will also make sense to build libcurl with the debug option (usually -g to the compiler) so that debugging it will be easier if you actually do find a leak in the library. This will create a library that has memory debugging enabled. Modify Your Application Add a line in your application code: curl_memdebug("filename"); This will make the malloc debug system output a full trace of all resource using functions to the given file name. Make sure you rebuild your program and that you link with the same libcurl you built for this purpose as described above. Run Your Application Run your program as usual. Watch the specified memory trace file grow. Make your program exit and use the proper libcurl cleanup functions etc. So that all non-leaks are returned/freed properly. Analyze the Flow Use the tests/memanalyze.pl perl script to analyze the memdump file: tests/memanalyze.pl < memdump This now outputs a report on what resources that were allocated but never freed etc. This report is very fine for posting to the list! If this doesn't produce any output, no leak was detected in libcurl. Then the leak is mostly likely to be in your code.