On Tue, 23 Jul 2002 21:12:33 Craig wrote:

Ran 'Links' on my web server to see some website was alive and when I quit the program.. it said:

Memory leak by 28 bytes

List of blocks: 0x8116438:52 @ dns.c:374

Forcing core dump Man the Lifeboats! Women and children first! Segmentation fault

Woo! Oh the box is using debian, looks like they screwed up something?

It would appear that the Links program has been linked with a debugging memory allocator (malloc and friends) which records where blocks of memory were asked for and checks at the end of the program that all the memory asked for was free'd again.

So, at line 374 of the file dns.c the program asked for 52 bytes or memory which malloc was able to find and gave the program the address 0x8116438 to use. The program never got round to freeing this memory so the library complains.

So, it would appear there is a bug in the Links program but it is also strange that production code would still be linked with a debugging memory allocator.

I would not worry about this as Linux will free all the memory the program used anyway when it finishes. It looks like you already have core files turned off (ulimit -c 0) and best to keep it this way or they will appear in whatever directory you run the Links program in.

Steve.