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Re: [Wireshark-dev] Freeing memory when quitting Wireshark
From: Guy Harris <guy_at_nospam>Date: Tue Aug 02 2011 - 20:21:41 GMT
To: Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev@wireshark.org>
On Aug 2, 2011, at 12:21 PM, Alex Lindberg wrote:
> When I quit a custom build of Wireshark (Win32), although the application disappears from the desktop, it remains in memory.
What do you mean "remains in memory"?
Perhaps Windows - which probably means Windows NT these days, with XP and later being the predominant desktop versions - doesn't have the same model as UN*X, where
1) when a process exits, "anonymous" pages in the process address space, as allocated by malloc() and the like, simply disappear without having to be explicitly unallocated;
2) file-backed pages, such as pages from the executable image and dynamically-loaded code (shared libraries, etc.), remain in memory (but aren't wired into memory, so they're reused if you use the executable or the dynamically-loaded code again and are still in memory, but their page frames can be reused for other purposes);
but I doubt it does. This means that there is no need to explicitly free memory when Wireshark (or any other program) exits - it gets freed (and more quickly than if it were explicitly freed).
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