thanks all who helped. I fiddled a bit more with my leak (updated my sources contrib). it helped me get more insight in programs memory usage.
as a sidenote: one thing i learned is that using lib9p with filetrees when having 'lots' of files 'lots' of strings get stored (partly (largely?) duplicated) due to the estrdup9p in createfile (for uid, guid, muid, and name). (I think for 25000 files this 'cost' 2 Mb or so) would sharing those strings be an option? (or just make things more complicated?) (in this case I rewrote my code to no longer use filetrees - as suggested in 9p(2) - my file hierarchy was very regular indeed) Axel.
