Re: ncurses: tgetent leaks nearly 10 KB of memory every time it is called

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Matt wrote:

> Dear GNU ncurses maintainers,
>
> Sorry about the scary subject -- that's only a true statement for
> the old version of ncurses (5.2-20020615) that the latest version
> of FreeBSD (6.1) still uses for their standard curses library.
> I think you've fixed that enormous leak already.

I might have.  There's a known leak of the terminal data due to a knot in 
the way "use=" clauses are combined.  I don't recall checking for repeated 
calls on tgetent(), though.

> However, in ncurses 5.5 there still seems to be a very slow leak
> in tgetent. I mentioned that in the bug report I filed to FreeBSD:
>  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=98975

That's probably the fixup for sgr0 (makes a copy of it to translate into
termcap).  I might be able to improve that (I seem to recall noticing 
there was still a leak in it).

> I clock it leaking 4 KB for every 200 calls to tgetent, or about
> 20 bytes per call. Sorry, I don't have any more time to investigate
> it, but I figured I should drop you a note. If you write a little
> program that calls tgetent(NULL, "vt100") repeatedly you should
> be able to confirm or deny my observation.

curious - what sort of application (other than for testing) makes repeated 
calls to tgetent() for the same $TERM ?

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net