[LOGCXX-161] Using RollingFileAppender increases the working set with each rollover

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.10.0
• Fix Version/s: 0.10.0
• Component/s: Appender
• Assignee: Curt Arnold
• Reporter: Peter Steiner
• Created: 13/Nov/06 10:48
• Updated: 10/Jan/07 19:21
• Resolved: 10/Jan/07 19:21

Description

There seems to be a memory leak in APR 1.2.7 (see http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=40955) which can be reproduced using RollingFileAppenders:

I have observed that our application increases its working set in 8k steps. I have tracked it down to happen whenever the log file rolls over:

log4cxx::rolling::RollingFileAppender::rollover() (Line 153) calls WriterAppender::closeWriter() which allocates a new APR pool. Before this pool is freed, a call
to allocator_free() comes from a FileOutputStream destructor, followed by the allocator_free() call for the closeWriter pool. Because of the above APR bug, only one of these pools is deallocated...

Perusing the guide lines for APR pools (http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/apr/apr/trunk/docs/pool-design.html?view=co), I suppose that closeWriter doesn't need its own pool ("Objects should not have their own pools."). When I changed the log4cxx source accordingly, I couldn't reproduce the leak anymore. (UPDATE: that's not true)