Stephen, I have been out the for the last week (since 4/16, as a matter of fact.....Santa Fe was great!) so if this problem has not been resolved, please let me know. The problem was noticed in Solaris 2.0, and fixed in a patch to SunOS 4.1.3. You will also notice that the tzfile being used is opened and read for each call to tzset(), and the memory was not being freed. I can get you a new libc if necessary. joel
From eubank@predict.com Fri Apr 16 16:58 PDT 1993 To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: tzload memory leak?
I've been using an application (under SunOS 4.1.3) which switches time zones frequently. It has a memory leak which I think I've tracked down to tzload, which I call via tzset. Since it would hardly be noticeable to anyone who didn't happen to be using (or abusing) tzset thousands of times, I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been noticed before. On the off chance that someone out there has encountered it, can you send me pointers to patches, workarounds, etc.? I can't switch to Solaris yet.
Here are some details: I profile this code:
#include <time.h>
main() { int i; for (i=0; i<100; i++) { tzset(); } }
and find that malloc is called roughly 400 times, while free is called roughly 300 times. If I increase the number of iterations in the loop tp 1000, the calls to malloc and free go up by a factor of 10. malloc is being called from calloc, which is being called from allocall, which is being called from tzload. It looks to me like tzload allocates 4 things and only frees 3 of them each time it is called.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Stephen Eubank eubank@predict.com