AfxBeginThread Memory Leak?

[muhandis]

I am starting some threads using AfxBeginThread and they work by monitoring a flag (sent via lParam) and once they find the flag is set, they return. However, once they do return, they aren't deleted and I get a memory leak.

Shouldn't this method work fine and not cause any memory leaks because m_bAutoDelete is by default set to true? I've read that it's best to just allow the thread to return by itself, and it'll just automatically delete itself.

Here's the code I'm testing:

UINT ThreadProc(LPARAM lParam) {
	CThreadTestDlg* pDlg = (CThreadTestDlg*) lParam;
	char str[128];
	int counter = 0;

	pDlg->m_running = true;
	while (pDlg->m_running) {
		sprintf_s(str, "Counter: %d", counter);
		pDlg->m_text.SetWindowText(str);
		counter++;
		Sleep(1000);
	}

	return 0;
}
void CThreadTestDlg::OnBnClickedStart()
{
	if (!m_running) AfxBeginThread((AFX_THREADPROC)ThreadProc, this);
}

void CThreadTestDlg::OnBnClickedStop()
{
	OutputDebugString("\n-------- Start --------\n");
	_CrtMemState state;
	_CrtMemCheckpoint(&state);
	_CrtMemDumpStatistics(&state);
	OutputDebugString("--------- End ---------\n\n");

	m_running = false;
}

And this is my debug output, where you can see how the memory leak occurs:

-------- Start --------
0 bytes in 0 Free Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Normal Blocks.
9085 bytes in 49 CRT Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Ignore Blocks.
132 bytes in 2 Client Blocks.
Largest number used: 9749 bytes.
Total allocations: 15192 bytes.
--------- End ---------

The thread 'Win32 Thread' (0xdd8) has exited with code 0 (0x0).

-------- Start --------
0 bytes in 0 Free Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Normal Blocks.
9085 bytes in 49 CRT Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Ignore Blocks.
132 bytes in 2 Client Blocks.
Largest number used: 9749 bytes.
Total allocations: 16324 bytes.
--------- End ---------

The thread 'Win32 Thread' (0x1114) has exited with code 0 (0x0).

-------- Start --------
0 bytes in 0 Free Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Normal Blocks.
9085 bytes in 49 CRT Blocks.
0 bytes in 0 Ignore Blocks.
132 bytes in 2 Client Blocks.
Largest number used: 9749 bytes.
Total allocations: 17456 bytes.
--------- End ---------

The thread 'Win32 Thread' (0x1090) has exited with code 0 (0x0).

[Salem]

You're checking for leaks way too early.

There are all sorts of things which could still be allocated in the middle of an active class member function.

int main ( ) {
  // your entire program

  OutputDebugString("\n-------- Start --------\n");
  _CrtMemState state;
  _CrtMemCheckpoint(&state);
  _CrtMemDumpStatistics(&state);
  OutputDebugString("--------- End ---------\n\n");

  return 0;
}

Even then, you need to be mindful of any global variables which call a constructor before main() gets called to begin with.

[muhandis]

I created that test project to test for exactly that - I thought there might some other stuff in my program so I wrote a quick test program to test it.

That code that you see there is all I wrote, other than adding "bool m_running" to the .h file as a member. The rest is generated stuff.

I know that there's a memory leak caused by the thread shutting down because I've run a test where I had that debug text printing out every second, and the allocated memory would stay constant until a thread was stopped.

[Salem]

Phew, I'm glad that's sorted out then.