Re: [Boost-users] Boost.Thread memory leak reported

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-08-29 14:47:51

Elisha Berns wrote:

[...]

> Secondly, how many microseconds does it actually take to free the
> memory allocated by the threadmon mutex?

It's not a question of microseconds. The "thread safe singleton" pattern 
solves the initialization order problem. You want a particular object to be 
available for the lifetime of the program, as if it was initialized before 
everything else and destroyed after everything else.

C++ doesn't guarantee a particular initialization order for file scope 
objects in different translation units, so we have to resort to local 
statics or call_once.

I haven't studied the threadmon code in detail, though. It might be possible 
to destroy the threadmon mutex safely at some point during shutdown.

My original point was that this is a legitimate coding idiom and not a 
memory leak. It might be a resource leak on Windows 9x; I no longer keep 
Win9x around so I can't check.