Problem usage memory in C

Question

Please help :) OS : Linux

Where in " sleep(1000);", at this time "top (display Linux tasks)" wrote me 7.7 %MEM use. valgrind : not found memory leak.

I understand, wrote correctly and all malloc result is NULL. But Why in this time "sleep" my program NOT decreased memory ? What missing ?

Sorry for my bad english, Thanks

~ # tmp_soft
For : Is it free??  no
Is it free??  yes
For 0 
For : Is it free??  no
Is it free??  yes
For 1 
END : Is it free??  yes
END 

~ #top
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                
23060 root      20   0  155m 153m  448 S    0  7.7   0:01.07 tmp_soft    

Full source : tmp_soft.c

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

struct cache_db_s
{
 int       table_update;
 struct    cache_db_s * p_next;
};

void free_cache_db (struct cache_db_s ** cache_db)
{
 struct cache_db_s * cache_db_t;
 while (*cache_db != NULL)
 {
  cache_db_t = *cache_db;
  *cache_db = (*cache_db)->p_next;
  free(cache_db_t);
  cache_db_t = NULL;
 }
 printf("Is it free??  %s\n",*cache_db==NULL?"yes":"no");
}

void make_cache_db (struct cache_db_s ** cache_db)
{
 struct cache_db_s * cache_db_t = NULL;
 int n = 10000000;

 for (int i=0; i = n; i++)
 {
  if ((cache_db_t=malloc(sizeof(struct cache_db_s)))==NULL) {
   printf("Error : malloc 1 -> cache_db_s (no free memory) \n");
   break;
  }
  memset(cache_db_t, 0, sizeof(struct cache_db_s));

  cache_db_t->table_update = 1; // tmp 

  cache_db_t->p_next = *cache_db;
  *cache_db = cache_db_t;
  cache_db_t = NULL;
 }
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
 struct cache_db_s * cache_db = NULL;

 for (int ii=0; ii  2; ii++) {
  make_cache_db(&cache_db);
  printf("For : Is it free??  %s\n",cache_db==NULL?"yes":"no");
  free_cache_db(&cache_db);
  printf("For %d \n", ii);
 }

 printf("END : Is it free??  %s\n",cache_db==NULL?"yes":"no");
 printf("END \n");
 sleep(1000);
 return 0;
}

Answer 1

If you're trying to establish whether your program has a memory leak, then top isn't the right tool for the job (valrind is).

top shows memory usage as seen by the OS. Even if you call free, there is no guarantee that the freed memory would get returned to the OS. Typically, it wouldn't. Nonetheless, the memory does become "free" in the sense that your process can use it for subsequent allocations.

edit If your libc supports it, you could try experimenting with M_TRIM_THRESHOLD. Even if you do follow this path, it's going to be tricky (a single used block sitting close to the top of the heap would prevent all free memory below it from being released to the OS).