[c] What REALLY happens when you don't free after malloc?

This has been something that has bothered me for ages now.

We are all taught in school (at least, I was) that you MUST free every pointer that is allocated. I'm a bit curious, though, about the real cost of not freeing memory. In some obvious cases, like when malloc is called inside a loop or part of a thread execution, it's very important to free so there are no memory leaks. But consider the following two examples:

First, if I have code that's something like this:

int main()
{
    char *a = malloc(1024);
    /* Do some arbitrary stuff with 'a' (no alloc functions) */
    return 0;
}

What's the real result here? My thinking is that the process dies and then the heap space is gone anyway so there's no harm in missing the call to free (however, I do recognize the importance of having it anyway for closure, maintainability, and good practice). Am I right in this thinking?

Second, let's say I have a program that acts a bit like a shell. Users can declare variables like aaa = 123 and those are stored in some dynamic data structure for later use. Clearly, it seems obvious that you'd use some solution that will calls some *alloc function (hashmap, linked list, something like that). For this kind of program, it doesn't make sense to ever free after calling malloc because these variables must be present at all times during the program's execution and there's no good way (that I can see) to implement this with statically allocated space. Is it bad design to have a bunch of memory that's allocated but only freed as part of the process ending? If so, what's the alternative?

Yes you are right, your example doesn't do any harm (at least not on most modern operating systems). All the memory allocated by your process will be recovered by the operating system once the process exits.

Source: Allocation and GC Myths (PostScript alert!)

Allocation Myth 4: Non-garbage-collected programs should always deallocate all memory they allocate.

The Truth: Omitted deallocations in frequently executed code cause growing leaks. They are rarely acceptable. but Programs that retain most allocated memory until program exit often perform better without any intervening deallocation. Malloc is much easier to implement if there is no free.

In most cases, deallocating memory just before program exit is pointless. The OS will reclaim it anyway. Free will touch and page in the dead objects; the OS won't.

Consequence: Be careful with "leak detectors" that count allocations. Some "leaks" are good!

That said, you should really try to avoid all memory leaks!

Second question: your design is ok. If you need to store something until your application exits then its ok to do this with dynamic memory allocation. If you don't know the required size upfront, you can't use statically allocated memory.

It is completely fine to leave memory unfreed when you exit; malloc() allocates the memory from the memory area called "the heap", and the complete heap of a process is freed when the process exits.

That being said, one reason why people still insist that it is good to free everything before exiting is that memory debuggers (e.g. valgrind on Linux) detect the unfreed blocks as memory leaks, and if you have also "real" memory leaks, it becomes more difficult to spot them if you also get "fake" results at the end.

I typically free every allocated block once I'm sure that I'm done with it. Today, my program's entry point might be main(int argc, char *argv[]) , but tomorrow it might be foo_entry_point(char **args, struct foo *f) and typed as a function pointer.

So, if that happens, I now have a leak.

Regarding your second question, if my program took input like a=5, I would allocate space for a, or re-allocate the same space on a subsequent a="foo". This would remain allocated until:

1. The user typed 'unset a'
2. My cleanup function was entered, either servicing a signal or the user typed 'quit'

I can not think of any modern OS that does not reclaim memory after a process exits. Then again, free() is cheap, why not clean up? As others have said, tools like valgrind are great for spotting leaks that you really do need to worry about. Even though the blocks you example would be labeled as 'still reachable' , its just extra noise in the output when you're trying to ensure you have no leaks.

Another myth is "If its in main(), I don't have to free it", this is incorrect. Consider the following:

char *t;

for (i=0; i < 255; i++) {
    t = strdup(foo->name);
    let_strtok_eat_away_at(t);
}

If that came prior to forking / daemonizing (and in theory running forever), your program has just leaked an undetermined size of t 255 times.

A good, well written program should always clean up after itself. Free all memory, flush all files, close all descriptors, unlink all temporary files, etc. This cleanup function should be reached upon normal termination, or upon receiving various kinds of fatal signals, unless you want to leave some files laying around so you can detect a crash and resume.

Really, be kind to the poor soul who has to maintain your stuff when you move on to other things .. hand it to them 'valgrind clean' :)

This code will usually work alright, but consider the problem of code reuse.

You may have written some code snippet which doesn't free allocated memory, it is run in such a way that memory is then automatically reclaimed. Seems allright.

Then someone else copies your snippet into his project in such a way that it is executed one thousand times per second. That person now has a huge memory leak in his program. Not very good in general, usually fatal for a server application.

Code reuse is typical in enterprises. Usually the company owns all the code its employees produce and every department may reuse whatever the company owns. So by writing such "innocently-looking" code you cause potential headache to other people. This may get you fired.

There's actually a section in the OSTEP online textbook for an undergraduate course in operating systems which discusses exactly your question.

The relevant section is "Forgetting To Free Memory" in the Memory API chapter on page 6 which gives the following explanation:

In some cases, it may seem like not calling free() is reasonable. For example, your program is short-lived, and will soon exit; in this case, when the process dies, the OS will clean up all of its allocated pages and thus no memory leak will take place per se. While this certainly “works” (see the aside on page 7), it is probably a bad habit to develop, so be wary of choosing such a strategy

This excerpt is in the context of introducing the concept of virtual memory. Basically at this point in the book, the authors explain that one of the goals of an operating system is to "virtualize memory," that is, to let every program believe that it has access to a very large memory address space.

Behind the scenes, the operating system will translate "virtual addresses" the user sees to actual addresses pointing to physical memory.

However, sharing resources such as physical memory requires the operating system to keep track of what processes are using it. So if a process terminates, then it is within the capabilities and the design goals of the operating system to reclaim the process's memory so that it can redistribute and share the memory with other processes.

EDIT: The aside mentioned in the excerpt is copied below.

ASIDE: WHY NO MEMORY IS LEAKED ONCE YOUR PROCESS EXITS

When you write a short-lived program, you might allocate some space using malloc(). The program runs and is about to complete: is there need to call free() a bunch of times just before exiting? While it seems wrong not to, no memory will be "lost" in any real sense. The reason is simple: there are really two levels of memory management in the system. The first level of memory management is performed by the OS, which hands out memory to processes when they run, and takes it back when processes exit (or otherwise die). The second level of management is within each process, for example within the heap when you call malloc() and free(). Even if you fail to call free() (and thus leak memory in the heap), the operating system will reclaim all the memory of the process (including those pages for code, stack, and, as relevant here, heap) when the program is finished running. No matter what the state of your heap in your address space, the OS takes back all of those pages when the process dies, thus ensuring that no memory is lost despite the fact that you didn’t free it.

Thus, for short-lived programs, leaking memory often does not cause any operational problems (though it may be considered poor form). When you write a long-running server (such as a web server or database management system, which never exit), leaked memory is a much bigger issue, and will eventually lead to a crash when the application runs out of memory. And of course, leaking memory is an even larger issue inside one particular program: the operating system itself. Showing us once again: those who write the kernel code have the toughest job of all...

from Page 7 of Memory API chapter of

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau Arpaci-Dusseau Books March, 2015 (Version 0.90)

You are absolutely correct in that respect. In small trivial programs where a variable must exist until the death of the program, there is no real benefit to deallocating the memory.

In fact, I had once been involved in a project where each execution of the program was very complex but relatively short-lived, and the decision was to just keep memory allocated and not destabilize the project by making mistakes deallocating it.

That being said, in most programs this is not really an option, or it can lead you to run out of memory.

I think that your two examples are actually only one: the free() should occur only at the end of the process, which as you point out is useless since the process is terminating.

In you second example though, the only difference is that you allow an undefined number of malloc(), which could lead to running out of memory. The only way to handle the situation is to check the return code of malloc() and act accordingly.

You are correct, memory is automatically freed when the process exits. Some people strive not to do extensive cleanup when the process is terminated, since it will all be relinquished to the operating system. However, while your program is running you should free unused memory. If you don't, you may eventually run out or cause excessive paging if your working set gets too big.

There's no real danger in not freeing your variables, but if you assign a pointer to a block of memory to a different block of memory without freeing the first block, the first block is no longer accessible but still takes up space. This is what's called a memory leak, and if you do this with regularity then your process will start to consume more and more memory, taking away system resources from other processes.

If the process is short-lived you can often get away with doing this as all allocated memory is reclaimed by the operating system when the process completes, but I would advise getting in the habit of freeing all memory you have no further use for.

If you're developing an application from scratch, you can make some educated choices about when to call free. Your example program is fine: it allocates memory, maybe you have it work for a few seconds, and then closes, freeing all the resources it claimed.

If you're writing anything else, though -- a server/long-running application, or a library to be used by someone else, you should expect to call free on everything you malloc.

Ignoring the pragmatic side for a second, it's much safer to follow the stricter approach, and force yourself to free everything you malloc. If you're not in the habit of watching for memory leaks whenever you code, you could easily spring a few leaks. So in other words, yes -- you can get away without it; please be careful, though.

I completely disagree with everyone who says OP is correct or there is no harm.

Everyone is talking about a modern and/or legacy OS's.

But what if I'm in an environment where I simply have no OS? Where there isn't anything?

Imagine now you are using thread styled interrupts and allocate memory. In the C standard ISO/IEC:9899 is the lifetime of memory stated as:

7.20.3 Memory management functions

1 The order and contiguity of storage allocated by successive calls to the calloc, malloc, and realloc functions is unspecified. The pointer returned if the allocation succeeds is suitably aligned so that it may be assigned to a pointer to any type of object and then used to access such an object or an array of such objects in the space allocated (until the space is explicitly deallocated). The lifetime of an allocated object extends from the allocation until the deallocation.[...]

So it has not to be given that the environment is doing the freeing job for you. Otherwise it would be added to the last sentence: "Or until the program terminates."

So in other words: Not freeing memory is not just bad practice. It produces non portable and not C conform code. Which can at least be seen as 'correct, if the following: [...], is supported by environment'.

But in cases where you have no OS at all, no one is doing the job for you (I know generally you don't allocate and reallocate memory on embedded systems, but there are cases where you may want to.)

So speaking in general plain C (as which the OP is tagged), this is simply producing erroneous and non portable code.

If a program forgets to free a few Megabytes before it exits the operating system will free them. But if your program runs for weeks at a time and a loop inside the program forgets to free a few bytes in each iteration you will have a mighty memory leak that will eat up all the available memory in your computer unless you reboot it on a regular basis => even small memory leaks might be bad if the program is used for a seriously big task even if it originally wasn't designed for one.

If you're using the memory you've allocated, then you're not doing anything wrong. It becomes a problem when you write functions (other than main) that allocate memory without freeing it, and without making it available to the rest of your program. Then your program continues running with that memory allocated to it, but no way of using it. Your program and other running programs are deprived of that memory.

Edit: It's not 100% accurate to say that other running programs are deprived of that memory. The operating system can always let them use it at the expense of swapping your program out to virtual memory (</handwaving>). The point is, though, that if your program frees memory that it isn't using then a virtual memory swap is less likely to be necessary.

=== What about future proofing and code reuse? ===

If you don't write the code to free the objects, then you are limiting the code to only being safe to use when you can depend on the memory being free'd by the process being closed ... i.e. small one-time use projects or "throw-away"^[1] projects)... where you know when the process will end.

If you do write the code that free()s all your dynamically allocated memory, then you are future proofing the code and letting others use it in a larger project.

^{[1] regarding "throw-away" projects. Code used in "Throw-away" projects has a way of not being thrown away. Next thing you know ten years have passed and your "throw-away" code is still being used).}

^{I heard a story about some guy who wrote some code just for fun to make his hardware work better. He said "just a hobby, won't be big and professional". Years later lots of people are using his "hobby" code.}

It depends on the scope of the project that you're working on. In the context of your question, and I mean just your question, then it doesn't matter.

For a further explanation (optional), some scenarios I have noticed from this whole discussion is as follow:

(1) - If you're working in an embedded environment where you cannot rely on the main OS' to reclaim the memory for you, then you should free them since memory leaks can really crash the program if done unnoticed.

(2) - If you're working on a personal project where you won't disclose it to anyone else, then you can skip it (assuming you're using it on the main OS') or include it for "best practices" sake.

(3) - If you're working on a project and plan to have it open source, then you need to do more research into your audience and figure out if freeing the memory would be the better choice.

(4) - If you have a large library and your audience consisted of only the main OS', then you don't need to free it as their OS' will help them to do so. In the meantime, by not freeing, your libraries/program may help to make the overall performance snappier since the program does not have to close every data structure, prolonging the shutdown time (imagine a very slow excruciating wait to shut down your computer before leaving the house...)

I can go on and on specifying which course to take, but it ultimately depends on what you want to achieve with your program. Freeing memory is considered good practice in some cases and not so much in some so it ultimately depends on the specific situation you're in and asking the right questions at the right time. Good luck!

You are correct, no harm is done and it's faster to just exit

There are various reasons for this:

• All desktop and server environments simply release the entire memory space on exit(). They are unaware of program-internal data structures such as heaps.

• Almost all free() implementations do not ever return memory to the operating system anyway.

• More importantly, it's a waste of time when done right before exit(). At exit, memory pages and swap space are simply released. By contrast, a series of free() calls will burn CPU time and can result in disk paging operations, cache misses, and cache evictions.

Regarding the possiblility of future code reuse justifing the certainty of pointless ops: that's a consideration but it's arguably not the Agile way. YAGNI!

What's the real result here?

Your program leaked the memory. Depending on your OS, it may have been recovered.

Most modern desktop operating systems do recover leaked memory at process termination, making it sadly common to ignore the problem, as can be seen by many other answers here.)

But you are relying on a safety feature you should not rely upon, and your program (or function) might run on a system where this behaviour does result in a "hard" memory leak, next time.

You might be running in kernel mode, or on vintage / embedded operating systems which do not employ memory protection as a tradeoff. (MMUs take up die space, memory protection costs additional CPU cycles, and it is not too much to ask from a programmer to clean up after himself).

You can use and re-use memory any way you like, but make sure you deallocated all resources before exiting.