How to determine the amount of memory used by unmanaged code

Question

I'm working against a large COM library (ArcObjects) and I'm trying to pinpont a memory leak.
What is the most reliable way to determine the amount of memory used by unmanaged code/objects.
What performance counters can be used?

Answer 1

Use UMDH to get snapshot of your memory heap, run it twice then use the tools to show all the allocations that occurred between the 2 snapshots. This is great in helping you track down which areas might be leaking.

This article explains in in simple terms.

I suggest you use a CComPtr<> to wrap your objects, not forgetting that you must release it before passing it into a function that returns a raw pointer reference (as the cast operator will be used to get the pointer that then gets overwritten)

Answer 2

The 'Virtual Bytes' counter for a process represents the total amount of memory the process has reserved. If you have a memory leak then this will trend upwards.