Why does my windows console application leak when idling? (And why does the smoking gun point at kernel32.dll??)

Question

I have a windows multi-threded console application that appears to be leaking approximately 4kb private memory every minute or so.

In an effort to localise the leak, I have gradually suspended each thread in the application until the leak stopped, and to my surprise the culprit seems to be a thread named "Win32Thread".

It does not look like a thread I have explicitly started.

If I attach and break the application, the stack trace looks like this:

    ntdll.dll!_KiFastSystemCallRet@0()  
    ntdll.dll!_NtCancelTimer@8()  + 0xc bytes   
    ntdll.dll!_RtlpResetTimer@12()  + 0x15 bytes    
>   ntdll.dll!_RtlpServiceTimer@12()  + 0xfd bytes  
    ntdll.dll!_KiUserApcDispatcher@16()  + 0x25 bytes   
    kernel32.dll!_BaseThreadStart@8()  + 0x34 bytes 

Does anyone have any idea why this would suddenly leak?

The application as been running for about a 40hrs on a Win2k3 SP2 dual core system.

Any ideas are greately appreciated.

Answer 1

That stack trace looks like it's in code related to timers. I'd guess that your code (or a library you use) started a timer by using timeSetEvent or a similar function. In that case, the leak would probably be in your timer callback function.

Starting a multimedia timer causes a thread to be created, and your callback will be called from that thread. A periodic timer would explain why it leaks while idling.

Answer 2

Does your application have any APCs (Asynchronous procedure calls) or scheduled timer events? Multimedia timer callbacks would.

If your callback uses C runtime calls, these calls makes one-off thread local allocations (lazily, allocated first time the function is called in a thread) to do their work (_tcstol, sprintf etc). Because the thread was not started with beginthread() or beginthreadex() this memory can't be cleaned up when the thread dies, so that would manifest as a leak.