If you develop a program that dynamically allocates memory, you're also responsible for tracking any memory that you allocate whenever a task is performed, and for releasing that memory when you no longer need it. If you fail to track the memory correctly, you may introduce “memory leaks” or unintentionally write to an area outside of the memory space.
Conventional debugging techniques usually prove to be ineffective for locating the source of corruption or leaks because memory-related errors typically manifest themselves in an unrelated part of the program. Tracking down an error in a multithreaded environment becomes even more complicated because the threads all share the same memory address space.
In this chapter, we'll describe how QNX Neutrino manages the heap and introduce you to some techniques that can help you to diagnose your memory management problems.