[sane-devel] memory problem

Oliver Schirrmeister oschirr@abm.de
Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:49:12 +0200


Hi,

I'm trying to find a memory leak in the fujitsu backend.
When I do a duplex scan (for example with scanadf) the vm-size
of the process increases aproximatly the size of one image 
(for example ~4MB for DIN-A5-gray and ~8MB for DIN-A4-gray
at 300dpi). So all 250 sheets when the process reaches the 2GB
limit I run into problems.

I've configured sane to use pthreads and use sanei_thread_begin
to fork a reader thread that reads the data from the scanner and
writes it into two pipes (one for the frontside and one for the backside).

The scanner returns the image data in alternate order, one block
frontside, one block backside ...
So I write the front side data directly to the frontside-pipe and 
write the backside data in a buffer of the size of the image.
When the transfer is complete, I write that buffer into the backside
pipe.
I've checked it several times. I'm really freeing that buffer. The address
I free is really the address I got from alloc.

If I don't use a pipe for the backside and use a file (so I don't have to
allocate that buffer) there is no problem.

When I don't use threads (--enable-fork-process=YES) I don't have 
problems because the reader process terminates and frees all memory. So
I think the problem is in the reader thread.

I'm not killing the reader thread. I think it should terminate when the
reader-procedure ends.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Oliver