Insidious Memory Leaks, Part 1

Memory leaks are the bane of any software application that must run continuously for long periods of time. The common causes -- building arrays or concatenating strings within loops -- are relatively easy to spot for most developers. However, leaks can sometimes creep into applications in seemingly harmless ways. Consider the following code snippet, developed by a local integrator, that was extracted from an instrument polling loop that runs in parallel to a main application.It looked innocuous enough to me... Sure, why not use a notifier to stop the loop when the main application is stopped? It seemed to run without problems under Windows. However, when it was downloaded to a PXI-RT target, it leaked like a screen door on a submarine. The fix was simple enough: put the Obtain Notifier outside of the loop and pass in the refnum through a tunnel. You would think that Obtain Notifier would simply return a pointer to the existing notifier, but apparently things work differently enough in RT to cause headaches. I haven't tried it yet, but I bet the same (mis)behavior is evident when obtaining refnums from other synchronization tools.

The moral of the story is a simple one you see over and over again: if a code element doesn't need to be in a loop, then don't put it there. Duh.