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The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome

Memory Management

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Table of Content:

1. General overview
2. Setting libxml2 set of memory routines
3. Cleaning up after using the library
4. Debugging routines
5. General memory requirements
6. Returning memory to the kernel

General overview

The module xmlmemory.h provides the interfaces to the libxml2 memory system:

• libxml2 does not use the libc memory allocator directly but xmlFree(), xmlMalloc() and xmlRealloc()
• those routines can be reallocated to a specific set of routine, by default the libc ones i.e. free(), malloc() and realloc()
• the xmlmemory.c module includes a set of debugging routine

Setting libxml2 set of memory routines

It is sometimes useful to not use the default memory allocator, either for debugging, analysis or to implement a specific behaviour on memory management (like on embedded systems). Two function calls are available to do so:

• xmlMemGet () which return the current set of functions in use by the parser
• xmlMemSetup() which allow to set up a new set of memory allocation functions

Of course a call to xmlMemSetup() should probably be done before calling any other libxml2 routines (unless you are sure your allocations routines are compatibles).

Cleaning up after using the library

Libxml2 is not stateless, there is a few set of memory structures needing allocation before the parser is fully functional (some encoding structures for example). This also mean that once parsing is finished there is a tiny amount of memory (a few hundred bytes) which can be recollected if you don't reuse the library or any document built with it:

• xmlCleanupParser () is a centralized routine to free the library state and data. Note that it won't deallocate any produced tree if any (use the xmlFreeDoc() and related routines for this). This should be called only when the library is not used anymore.
• xmlInitParser () is the dual routine allowing to preallocate the parsing state which can be useful for example to avoid initialization reentrancy problems when using libxml2 in multithreaded applications

Generally xmlCleanupParser() is safe assuming no parsing is ongoing and no document is still being used, if needed the state will be rebuild at the next invocation of parser routines (or by xmlInitParser()), but be careful of the consequences in multithreaded applications.

Debugging routines

When configured using --with-mem-debug flag (off by default), libxml2 uses a set of memory allocation debugging routines keeping track of all allocated blocks and the location in the code where the routine was called. A couple of other debugging routines allow to dump the memory allocated infos to a file or call a specific routine when a given block number is allocated:

• xmlMallocLoc()xmlReallocLoc() and xmlMemStrdupLoc() are the memory debugging replacement allocation routines
• xmlMemoryDump () dumps all the information about the allocated memory block lefts in the .memdump file

When developing libxml2 memory debug is enabled, the tests programs call xmlMemoryDump () and the "make test" regression tests will check for any memory leak during the full regression test sequence, this helps a lot ensuring that libxml2 does not leak memory and bullet proof memory allocations use (some libc implementations are known to be far too permissive resulting in major portability problems!).

If the .memdump reports a leak, it displays the allocation function and also tries to give some information about the content and structure of the allocated blocks left. This is sufficient in most cases to find the culprit, but not always. Assuming the allocation problem is reproducible, it is possible to find more easily:

1. write down the block number xxxx not allocated

2. set environment XML_MEM_BREAKPOINT xxxx

3. run the program under a debugger and set a breakpoint on xmlMallocBreakpoint() a specific function called when this precise block is allocated

4. when the breakpoint is reached you can then do a fine analysis of the allocation an step to see the condition resulting in the missing deallocation.

I used to use a commercial tool to debug libxml2 memory problems but after noticing that it was not detecting memory leaks that simple mechanism was used and proved extremely efficient until now. Lately I have also used valgrind with quite some success, it is tied to the i386 architecture since it works by emulating the processor and instruction set, it is slow but extremely efficient, i.e. it spot memory usage errors in a very precise way.

General memory requirements

How much libxml2 memory require ? It's hard to tell in average it depends of a number of things:

• the parser itself should work in a fixed amount of memory, except for information maintained about the stacks of names and entities locations. The I/O and encoding handlers will probably account for a few KBytes. This is true for both the XML and HTML parser (though the HTML parser need more state).
• If you are generating the DOM tree then memory requirements will grow nearly linear with the size of the data. In general for a balanced textual document the internal memory requirement is about 4 times the size of the UTF8 serialization of this document (example the XML-1.0 recommendation is a bit more of 150KBytes and takes 650KBytes of main memory when parsed). Validation will add a amount of memory required for maintaining the external Dtd state which should be linear with the complexity of the content model defined by the Dtd
• If you need to work with fixed memory requirements or don't need the full DOM tree then using the xmlReader interface is probably the best way to proceed, it still allows to validate or operate on subset of the tree if needed.
• If you don't care about the advanced features of libxml2 like validation, DOM, XPath or XPointer, don't use entities, need to work with fixed memory requirements, and try to get the fastest parsing possible then the SAX interface should be used, but it has known restrictions.

Returning memory to the kernel

You may encounter that your process using libxml2 does not have a reduced memory usage although you freed the trees. This is because libxml2 allocates memory in a number of small chunks. When freeing one of those chunks, the OS may decide that giving this little memory back to the kernel will cause too much overhead and delay the operation. As all chunks are this small, they get actually freed but not returned to the kernel. On systems using glibc, there is a function call "malloc_trim" from malloc.h which does this missing operation (note that it is allowed to fail). Thus, after freeing your tree you may simply try "malloc_trim(0);" to really get the memory back. If your OS does not provide malloc_trim, try searching for a similar function.

Daniel Veillard

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