In our application, we have an process that forks a child process. In the child process, it creates a object using new but does not delete it.

So what happens to the memory when the child process exists? Will the undeleted pointer still take up system memory? The child process is forked by the parnet process over and over. The child process runs for a while and then exists.

Related, the child process create a socket, but does not close it. So what happens to the socket when the process closes? Will it linger around and exhaust the socket pool eventually? Thanks.

(I undertand those are problems and need to be fixed, I just want to know whan happens to existing application.)

WJ

At the time fork() is called the child becomes a copy of the parent. Anything new the child makes ends when the child exits.

When a process exits, any files it left open are closed and all of its memory is released.

There are some other kinds of system resources that a process can "leak" and leave around on exit. I think a GUI process using an X server can leave resource leaks in the X server.

The simple stuff (open files and the process's own memory) are recovered on exit, but other things might not be. I don't have the details on the things that might be leaked, just occasional painful experience.

That is one of the simple ones, entirely in the process's own memory. Entirely cleaned up on process exit; No problem.

shared memory segments

plus semaphores and alike