I am working on a large C++ project. It consists in a server that exposes a REST

Question

I am working on a large C++ project. It consists in a server that exposes a REST API, providing a simple and user-friendly interface for a very broad system comprising many other servers. The codebase is quite large and complex, and evolved through time without a proper design upfront. My task is to implement new features and refactor/fix the old code in order to make it more stable and reliable.

At the moment, the server creates a number of long-living objects that are never terminated nor disposed when the process terminates. This makes Valgrind almost unusable for leak detection, as it is impossible to distinguish between the thousands of (questionably) legitimate leaks from the "dangerous" ones.

My idea is to ensure that all objects are disposed before termination, but when I made this proposal, my colleagues and my boss opposed me pointing out that the OS is going to free that memory anyway (which is obvious to everybody) and disposing the objects will slow down the shutdown of the server (which, at the moment, is basically a call to std::exit). I replied that having a "clean" shutdown procedure does not necessarily imply that one must use it. We can always call std::quick_exit or just kill -9 the process if we feel impatient.

They replied "most Linux daemons and processes don't bother freeing up memory at shutdown". While I can see that, it is also true that our project does need accurate memory debugging, as I already found memory corruption, double frees and uninitialised variables.

What are your thoughts? Am I pursuing a pointless endeavour? If not, how can I convince my colleagues and my boss? If so, why, and what should I do instead?

Explanation / Answer

Add a switch to the server process that can be used during valgrind measurements that will release all of the memory. You can use this switch for testing. The impact will be minimal during normal operations.

We had a long running process that would take several minutes to releases 1000

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