I'm not convinced that the problem is memory related. I can guarantee that I have no leaks under Windows and based on the facts that I did not notice any unusual growth in memory usage under the code difference between the windows service and the Unix daemon are trivial I'm unconvinced that it is the application that leaks. Personally I fear that it has something to do with kernel parameter settings (I'm suspicious of maxdsiz and maxssiz) under HP-UX, but I'm really not qualified enough to make such a claim. A fact is that the application is naturally memory hungry (I have seen it peak at over 100MB under heavy load) and it may well be that under HP-UX it cores when it hits an OS imposed wall.
In that case it could be as simple as a ulimit setting. man 3 ulimit. man 1 ulimit (bash). man 2 getrlimit. You should also ensure you code is handling malloc() and "new" failures appropriately.
There is one more major difference between the HP-UX and the other environments: the HP9000 is a multi CPU machine, while both my Linux and WinXP Pro boxes a are single CPU machines. For this reason, concurrency issues (thread synchronisation) is another area I'd like to focus on when chasing this bug.
Indeed thread concurrency issues could be another cause. Can you set the CPU affinity on the HP-UX machine? If you can, set the process to say on a single CPU and see if the problem goes away.
Anyway, I'm at my wits end and need help from someone smarter.
Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com