[vox] [fwd] [svlug] mission critical computing and air safety

[Rod Roark]

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 11:36 am, Tim Riley wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 10:30, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > Here's a nice long post with some more details about the air traffic issue
> > last week (and his thoughts on the Windows conversions) from Rick Kwan over
> > at SVLUG.  Just thought it was interesting reading...
> 
> Sure is an interesting read. It seems like a memory leak in
> the application caused the problem. However, are memory leaks
> so common that they should be expected?

Memory leaks are common in applications that have not been
sufficiently tested and debugged to eliminate them.  It's a
sorry state of affairs when such an application is in
mission-critical use.

> Should the operating 
> system return leaked memory to the memory pool?

In general, the OS has no way to know when memory is in use
by mistake (while the app is still running).  Regardless of
whether a platform performs garbage collection (e.g. Java),
it's not only possible but common for memory leaks to occur.

> Should a person 
> have to reboot a computer every month to reset leaked memory?

Of course not.  It's embarrassing.

-- Rod