[Rd] R valgrind question

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2008, Daniel Oberski wrote:

>>>
>>> If run valgrind R then I get all sorts of warnings. I was wondering
>>> whether I should worry about them or not.
>>
>> Don't worry about them. Those are benign issues with the system
>> libraries.. insofar as you trust those libraries, which you should... in
>> general.
>>
>> Jeff
>
>
> Jeff,
>
> Thanks for your (reassuring) answer. I can see that you are right,
> especially about the warnings at the beginning, all of which come from
> ld-2.5.so.
>
> I think the memory leak warnings (which do come from libR.so) may have
> something to do with the apparent fact that valgrind stops before the
> main loop of R is over, so the memory is freed after that point. Or is
> this not true?

Various blocks of memory are not freed until the program is shut down, but 
are in use up to that point so it is not a 'leak'.  Most of the warnings 
are not from R itself but from e.g. readline or X11, and all are tiny.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595