Re: memory leak checking

Hi,

On 2019-04-22 20:29:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > On 2019-04-22 16:50:25 -0700, Mikhail Bautin wrote:
> >> What is the standard memory leak checking policy for the PostgreSQL
> >> codebase? I know there is some support for valgrind -- is the test suite
> >> being run continuously with valgrind on the build farm?
>
> > Leaks are allowed if they are once-per-backend type things. There's no
> > point in e.g. freeing information for timezone metadata, given that
> > it'll be used for the whole server lifetime. And there's such things in
> > psql too, IIRC.
>
> I would not call the timezone data a "leak", since it's still useful, and
> accessible from static pointers, right up to exit. A true leak for this
> purpose is memory that's allocated but not usefully accessible, and I'd
> say we discourage that; though small one-time leaks may not be worth the
> trouble to get rid of.

Right. I was only referring to it that way because the various leak
checking tools do, should've been more careful in wording...

Greetings,

Andres Freund