Subject: Re: memory leak in _libssh2_channel_open

Re: memory leak in _libssh2_channel_open

From: Peter Stuge <peter_at_stuge.se>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:46:39 +0100

Hi Steve,

Steven Dake wrote:
> I have a long running program which essentially opens a ssh session then
> periodically runs an exec operation over the session in a new channel.
> I have implemented it as a non-blocking implementation. I am using 1.4.0.
>
> The code seems to work well but I notice there is a bit of a leak found
> by valgrind:
> ==6656== at 0x4A074CD: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:236)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4EAC420: _libssh2_transport_read (transport.c:458)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4EA0694: _libssh2_packet_requirev (packet.c:1219)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4E97526: _libssh2_channel_open (channel.c:233)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4E97A8C: libssh2_channel_open_ex (channel.c:352)^M
> ==6656== by 0x405C9F: assembly_ssh_exec (trans_ssh.c:116)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4C3754A: job_dispatch (loop_job.c:39)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4C35FA6: qb_loop_run (loop.c:45)^M
> ==6656== by 0x4034DB: main (caped.c:163)^M
>
> If I run my application for 8 hours, the leak adds up to 300k of memory
> consumed. I had a look into the code for several hours and don't see an
> immediate way to fix the problem. I'm not sure even what the problem
> is, as the channel should free all packets on libssh2_channel_free.

The leaked memory is the session->payload buffer, which is actually
never freed by libssh2 at all.

Please see if the attached patch fixes the leak while still allowing
your program to keep running for a long time. I'm not completely sure
if the payload would need to be freed explicitly in _session_free()
or if there will always be a packet in the packets list refering to
it. Unsure. It would be helpful if you could test more. If my theory
is correct then memcheck should still report exactly one packet
leaked, regardless of running time. Then I will add freeing also to
_session_free().

> is there a bug in libssh2 here that is known?

Not known bug. I think most don't have long running sessions.

//Peter

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Received on 2012-02-24