Okay, I’m sold on PurifyPlus

Christopher Bowman of Wayport in the last few weeks has helped identify two memory leaks, one [1] in nsoracle, and another [2] in nsopenssl. Here’s the commit mail of Jeremy Collins committing Christopher’s patch to nsoracle. I’m in the process of creating a reproducible test case to verify his patch to nsopenssl.

So, what’s his secret? He uses PurifyPlus and apparently it clued him in. I’ve been hesitant to use Purify because I’ve never used it before; I’ve always used a free tool called Valgrind. Since I’ve been hunting this leak in nsopenssl for the past several months with little luck, I’ve decided it’s time I really got familiar with Purify and add it to my bag of tricks. Thanks a lot, Christopher, for showing me the value of Purify.

This might explain why folks like Janine Sisk and Andrew Grumet are still seeing memory leaks, if they’re using both nsoracle and nsopenssl on their servers. Hopefully soon, we’ll find out if their leaks have gone away or not.