Tracking down memory issues in Photoshop

Question

One of my users is reporting a crash. My plug-in will throw up an error message whenever it requests memory from Photoshop and receives a null pointer / the memory allocation fails. He gets it only after working 15min-2hours.

I cannot exactly reproduce this problem on my machine. However:

1- In general, you can easily make Photoshop crash if you go into Edit -> Preferences -> performance and set the memory usage to the maximum.

Using Photoshop's built-in plug-ins, it is possible to make Photoshop crash without calling 3rd party plug-ins.

Perhaps a slightly better design would be if that dialog would throw up a message box recommending that the user not set the memory so high?

1b- Because of that, I am not sure how to separate out plug-in crashes from Photoshop crashes. Does anybody have ideas?

2- It's possible that my plug-in has a memory leak...I know from experience this can also cause crashes. I don't think this is the case.

Noel Carboni · Answer

I suggest you instrument your memory allocation / deallocation calls with a "total allocation" accumulator that shows how much you have allocated (i.e., you add in the amount allocated, you subtract out the amount deallocated). Then log that counter at key times, for example at the end when you've done all your cleanup. If the counter doesn't get back to 0 exactly you have a problem in the plugin.

-Noel

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