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Unexpected Memory Leak When Using Go Channels with Goroutines - guide Required

👀 Views: 75 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-21
goroutines channels memory-leak concurrency Go

Can someone help me understand I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm optimizing some code but I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I've been banging my head against this for hours. I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. I'm working with a memory leak in my Go application when using channels with goroutines. I'm using Go 1.19 and have a scenario where I'm spawning multiple goroutines that read from a channel and send processed data to another channel. However, I've noticed that the memory usage continues to grow without bounds. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```go package main import ( "fmt" "sync" ) func main() { var wg sync.WaitGroup dataChannel := make(chan int) resultChannel := make(chan int) // Start 5 worker goroutines for i := 0; i < 5; i++ { wg.Add(1) go worker(dataChannel, resultChannel, &wg) } // Send data to the dataChannel go func() { for j := 0; j < 1000; j++ { dataChannel <- j } close(dataChannel) }() // Wait for workers to finish wg.Wait() close(resultChannel) // Collect results for result := range resultChannel { fmt.Println(result) } } func worker(dataChan, resultChan chan int, wg *sync.WaitGroup) { defer wg.Done() for data := range dataChan { resultChan <- process(data) } } func process(data int) int { // Simulate processing return data * data } ``` When I run this code, the memory usage starts to climb significantly. I suspect that the `resultChannel` is not being properly drained, leading to a buildup of unprocessed results. I’ve tried moving the result collection logic into a separate goroutine, but it hasn’t resolved the scenario. The application eventually crashes due to a memory allocation failure. Could anyone guide to identify what might be causing this memory leak? Are there best practices for managing channels and goroutines to prevent this kind of scenario? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! What am I doing wrong? For context: I'm using Go on Ubuntu. This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. Could this be a known issue? I'm developing on CentOS with Go. What's the correct way to implement this? I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 using the latest version of Go. What am I doing wrong? I'm open to any suggestions.