Plurrrr

With the recent talk about “Contexts” in the Rust community, and some other thoughts I had recently, I want to explore in a bit more detail what the difference between Futures and Tasks is in Rust.

The difference between Futures and Tasks is like the difference between concurrency and parallelism.

PostgreSQL is a well-designed open-source multi-purpose relational database system which is widely used throughout the world. It is one huge system with the integrated subsystems, each of which has a particular complex feature and works with each other cooperatively. Although understanding of the internal mechanism is crucial for both administration and integration using PostgreSQL, its hugeness and complexity prevent it. The main purposes of this document are to explain how each subsystem works, and to provide the whole picture of PostgreSQL.

So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak.

But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad categories, each with somewhat different behavior, and requiring distinct tools and approaches to debug. This post aims to describe these classes, and provide tools and techniques for figuring out both which class you’re dealing with, and how to find the leak.