Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark Memory Usage
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From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2016 13:37:16 -0400


On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 2:49 AM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

During my investigation into the performance issues with transum I noticed an apparent memory leak.  Each time I close and re-open the same 40 MB trace file, Wireshark memory usage increases by about 14 MB.  I thought it was a problem with my code but decided to check memory usage on the current 2.2 release.  I see the same problem:

 

 

Is this expected or is it a bug?


It's not uncommon to see that.  Whether it's a bug or not would require more investigation.  But keep in mind a number of factors:

* Wireshark intentionally doesn't free all memory when closing a file - that memory may be marked as "free" in Wireshark's memory allocator but kept around for future reuse (at least this was the case with emem; I suppose wmem is the same)
* Even if Wireshark free()s memory the libc (or whatever it is on Windows) may not return the memory to the OS for the same reasons as above
* We do run a fairly strict memory leak check on the buildbot - though that's with tshark and on Linux