Gee, I agree with John. I must be having a mellow day. Seriously, I don't think "leak" absolves blame. If you had a water leak it would definitely be a fault, not a "situation." "Leak" seems to perfectly characterize what happens: the region has lots of free memory, the program runs for a while, and now the free storage has mysteriously disappeared. Where did it go? It leaked.
The LE manuals use the term "storage leak problems." Of course, it's not really a storage or memory problem at all. It is a "failure to free" error. Memory is fine; the problem is the absence of free or delete instructions. Except for the fact that "memory leak" is an established term that most folks agree on and recognize, I would support the terminology "failure to free" error. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 11:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: How diagnose potential memory leaks with LE? Barry Merrill wrote: <begin extract> Is there really a reason to call a z/OS MEMORY ERROR a LEAK??? It's an ERROR. I know the Open Systems guys love to hide behind words that make it NOT seem to be their error, but why us??? <end extract/> and I strongly agree that the use of euphemisms for what are in fact errors is undesirable. In this case, however, the use of 'leak' instead of 'error' is a very old practice. The phrase 'storage leak' has been used at least since the 1970s to characterize situations in which dynamically allocated [usually] heap storage is incompletely freed at the end of its use, so that the total amount of this storage available gradually diminishes, leaks away, until processing can no longer continue or performance deteriorates spectacularly. Here, I think, some loss in precision would attend using a generic term like 'storage error' instead of the traditional one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
