My C++ GUI application on Linux Fedora uses Gtk+-2.0 and Glade-2.0 and underlying libraries. One window is frequently created and destroyed, but the memory usage always goes up, never down. When the window is created and displayed, a large chunk of memory is allocated. When it is destroyed, not only does this memory seem not to be recovered, but a further small chunk of memory is allocated. Using refdbg, I can see that the numerous objects allocated for the window are destroyed when the window is destroyed, so why does the memory usage go up not down?

I think Gtk makes extensive use of realloc - could this be causing memory to become fragmented and result in more/bigger blocks of memory being allocated?

My Gtk reference mentions that Gtk does garbage collection "when it gets around to it" - is there a way to force garbage collection?

Thanks for any advice.

Not really answering your question but, I don't tend to delete windows rather I toggle the hide / show attribute. This is the "typical approach" although for an application with lots of windows or dynamically created windows this is not appropriate.

I don't know Gtk+ so I would ask are you sure that you are actually deleting the window? If so I guess that it's a garbage problem which you could test by throwing your create and destroy window functions in a loop (several million times should trigger it) and track the memory.

graeme.

Thanks for the help, your suggestion worked great.