I am working on a project for a long time now and wasn't paying much attention to memory issues since they didn't cause any problems so far but I believe they will at some point. There are some actions to be taken like providing smaller assets to players that don't use/have full HD compatible displays and optimize some assets, yet I would like to know how do you guys (or girls why not!) deal with memory leaks. Is there something particularly important that I should look for when tracking the leaks? Are the leaks necessarily linked to "new" usage or should I look somewhere else too? Should a massive memory leak always be obvious to detect?

Also there is a second point, more specific for SFML users: I am using a resource manager class that loads all assets and provide them the other classes as needed or at the game boot. The resource manager holds sf::Image's and the classes that need to drawn something holds sf::Sprite's. Now, if I have two,three,four...a thousand similar instances of this class, will the resource manager still take just the memory needed for one sf::Image used by the consumer class or each instance will take more and more memory? Does this make sense at all?

Thanks in advance.

There's only one way to deal with leaks: Find them and fix them.

Leaks don't necessarily come from new/malloc statements in your own code, they could also happen indirectly if you don't call the proper cleanup methods in library code.

There are two methods to find leaks:

- Use a static analyzer that examines logical errors in your code.

- Run the executable using a memory profiler and watch for unreleased resources.

With good tools tiny leaks should be as easy to detect as massive ones.

Should a massive memory leak always be obvious to detect?

Then again, your definition of massive leak may differ from mine...

Are the leaks necessarily linked to "new" usage or should I look somewhere else too?

Also, if you are not using Smart Pointers and are still trying to match new/delete, there's nothing better than the experience of rolling out your own _NEW, _DELETE and going through the logs and matching it all.

Usually, that exercise alone is enough to persuade one it's really time to move to Smart Pointers

Do you use linux (or may it)? If you do look for a program called valgrind.

It will give you a memory report that is very accurate and includes memory leaks and memory errors. I always validate my code with it.

The link for the project is here: http://valgrind.org/

Also there is a second point, more specific for SFML users: I am using a resource manager class that loads all assets and provide them the other classes as needed or at the game boot. The resource manager holds sf::Image's and the classes that need to drawn something holds sf::Sprite's. Now, if I have two,three,four...a thousand similar instances of this class, will the resource manager still take just the memory needed for one sf::Image used by the consumer class or each instance will take more and more memory? Does this make sense at all?

I'm not sure if this helps, but personally I have a small class based mostly around an std::map that holds my sf::texture objects (sf::image in your case). That's the only place that textures get loaded and they are all loaded one time at startup. The class has a getSpriteByKey method that returns an sf::sprite with a given texture/image attached to it. I don't create sprites until I need them (though I do try to keep them around once I have created them if I know I'll need them again where possible).

Thanks for the suggestions. They´ve helped me. I think I found the problem (or the worst part of it). I have a std::vector with dynamic allocated objects being pushed under a certain condition. The problem is that when another certain condition is met, I was just popping them. So I guess I should´ve used delete before popping them? Is this correct? I think this is the problem because after commenting this relevant part of the code my memory consumption has stopped to increase.

Yep, that solved the problem. There are other minor leaks to fix so I´ll assume the same solution for now.

edit: just a note, I wasn´t popping the objects. I was doing "erase" from std::vector. I am still doing it but now I delete them before that. I read somewhere that I should nullify AND also delete. Is this correct?