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Memory leak implementing custom allocator in C++17 using std::vector

👀 Views: 436 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-27
c++17 memory-management custom-allocator C++

I'm stuck trying to I'm getting frustrated with I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple... I'm working on a performance-sensitive application that utilizes C++17, and I implemented a custom allocator for `std::vector` to manage memory allocation more efficiently. However, I'm working with unexpected memory leak issues when I resize the vector, which I need to seem to debug. The custom allocator is derived from `std::allocator` and overrides the necessary methods. Here's a simplified version of my allocator: ```cpp #include <memory> #include <iostream> #include <vector> template <typename T> class CustomAllocator : public std::allocator<T> { public: using value_type = T; CustomAllocator() = default; template <typename U> CustomAllocator(const CustomAllocator<U>&) {} T* allocate(std::size_t n) { std::cout << "Allocating " << n << " elements" << std::endl; return static_cast<T*>(::operator new(n * sizeof(T))); } void deallocate(T* p, std::size_t n) { std::cout << "Deallocating " << n << " elements" << std::endl; ::operator delete(p); } }; int main() { std::vector<int, CustomAllocator<int>> myVec; myVec.push_back(1); myVec.push_back(2); myVec.resize(5); return 0; } ``` Despite implementing the `allocate` and `deallocate` functions, I noticed that after multiple resizes, the program reports a memory leak when profiling. The specific behavior I receive from Valgrind is: ``` ==12345== 32 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 1 of 1 ``` I suspect the question is related to how I'm handling the memory in the `resize` method of `std::vector`. I remembered that `std::vector` first allocates a new memory block when increasing its size, then moves the elements and finally calls the `deallocate` method on the old memory block. However, I'm not sure if my allocator's `deallocate` method is being called properly during this process. I've tried adding additional logging in my `deallocate` method to confirm if it's being invoked, but I sometimes see mismatched allocation and deallocation counts. Could anyone shed some light on what might be going wrong with my custom allocator and how I can resolve these memory leaks? What am I doing wrong? My development environment is Linux. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm open to any suggestions. Any feedback is welcome! What are your experiences with this?