[ODE] apparent memory leaks

[Nate W]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Si Brown wrote:

> >also, i have some memory leaks.  for example, dSphereClass never gets 
> >freed.  i don't see anywhere in ode that takes care of freeing 
> >dSphereClass.  Am I missing something?

I ran into the same thing, using MSVC's _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks to detect
leakage.  Are you using VC.Net?

Anyhow... In ODE .025, the geometry class singletons were not freed, but
it's not a problem because they're singletons (only one of each will ever
be allocated) and the OS wipes the entire heap when the process
terminates.  So it's nothing to worry about.  I still prefer a clean
memory leak dump when my app closes, though.  It beats having to scan a
list of a half-dozen "leaks" and make sure there isn't an extra leak or
two due to something wrong in my application code.  So I wrote some code
to explicitly free the singletons.

My recall is pretty fuzzy here, as I haven't dealt with this since
upgrading to .030, but... I think Russ put some cleanup code in .030 but
now there's a timing issue - your app is probably calling
_CrtDumpMemoryLeaks before ODE cleans up the singletons.  I couldn't find
a way to resolve that timing issue because MFC calls _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks
from deep inside itself... so, I put the explicit-cleanup function back
into my ODE DLL and now I'm getting perfect memory leak reports again.

Here's the function, just invoke it somewhere in your app's shutdown code.  
In my case it's called during CMyApp::~CMyApp, and that works fine:

void __declspec (dllexport)  dCloseODE () 
{
	if (colliders)
	{
		dFree (colliders->_data, sizeof (dColliderEntry) * classes->_anum);
		dFree (colliders, sizeof(dArrayBase));
		colliders = 0;
	}
	if (classes)
	{
		for (int i = 0; i < classes->size (); i++)
		{
			dFree ((*classes)[i], sizeof (dxGeomClass));
		}
		dFree (classes->_data, sizeof (dxGeomClass*) * classes->_anum);
		dFree (classes, sizeof(dArrayBase));
		classes = 0;
	} 
}


Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com