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Openbsd

Creating a memory leak on Linux/Unix

I recently had to create a memory leak to do some testing, here is a snippet of code that I used to create a leak. You can adjust malloc size to allocate more memory, or adjust the usleep to adjust how aggressive it is. the code below on a machine with 500M of memory would chew up about 1% memory a second. Enjoy!

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(void) {
    /* An infinite loop. */
    while (1) {
       /* Try to allocate some memory. */
       malloc(8386080);
       /* sleep for a bit so its not so aggressive */
       usleep(10000);
    }
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

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