[gst-devel] Memory leaks

[Steve Fink]

I am trying to track down a slow memory leak in my gstreamer pipeline.
I attempted to simplify the pipeline, but it seems like *every*
pipeline I try leaks.

For example: audiotestsrc ! filesink location=/dev/null

leaked a very steady 750KB/sec. So I'll write that one off to a major
refcounting bug in filesink, perhaps.

audiotestsrc ! alsasink

leaked much more slowly, only 3.9KB/sec. Again, though, the leakage
rate was very steady.

For my element, I tracked down one leak by running with
GST_DEBUG='GST_REFCOUNTING:5' and grepping for '->80' (the first
refcount that reached 80, indicating that some object was accumulating
references over time.) That caught my one leak, but then that trick
didn't work anymore. Probably because I'm creating a bunch of objects
whose refcounts never get above 1 or 2, I suppose.

I even tried letting it leak for a while and then dumping out the
memory region that had grown. It had lots of 0xff in it and no text,
which didn't tell me much. (My audio signals tend to be 0x00 or
swerving all over the place, for what it's worth.)

I'm assuming that a PLAYING pipeline shouldn't use up more memory over time?

Any tips?