Finding Memory Leaks of Legend of Tux

Here is a process I used to resovle a memory leak in The Legend of Tux.

This is a helpful way to find memory leaks under Windows.

First, start Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Delete => Start Task Manager)

Click the Processes tab

Start your application, and the name of your executable should show up in the list

In the screen below, I see that my program is using 13M of memory, and half the CPU

When I go to the stage select screen, it still uses about half the CPU, but the memory used jumps to 26.5 M

I select a stage, and the memory used again increases to 87M

I quit the stage, return to the title screen, and select another stage, which increases the memory used to 168 M.

Since the memory increases occur when a new screen is loaded, I have a good clue that makes me believe that the memory leak is due to not freeing the memory used to store the music data buffer.

I checked the audio.c file that I am using to handle the SDL_Mixer commands, added "Mix_FreeMusic(music);" and "music = NULL;" code before the audio is loaded. I recompiled and tried the program again, but the memory still significantly increased between screens.

My next guess is that it is due to the SDL_Surface objects not being free'd.