Use of this facility does not fragment your application's heap. ZF tracks the items in each logical heap for you and avoids using separate physical heaps.

Example of use:

Assume that you have an application with a leak problem. Further assume that it takes days for your application to begin showing signs of leaks. Problem: by the time the application is ready for leak analysis, ten's of thousands malloced blocks are present in the heap. "Find Leaks" becomes slow because of the exhaustive nature of its Garbage Collection. "Show Heap" produces a window that has too many entries to analyze. Solution: Use a new heap or heaps. Implementation: start ZF with the -ZSquelch option. After your application is running and stable, click on "New Heap" to obtain another heap. Periodically obtain new heaps as needed to constrain malloc collection into managable units. It is best to do this after allowing your application sufficient time to begin exhibiting leak behavior. Disable the MessageFilter->Squelch option and begin analysis obtaining new heaps to collect malloc data that is associated with new user actions or new events. Select higher numbered heaps to perform automatic leak detection with "Find Leaks".

Summary: the focus of this release is to present new features that help with the data overload problem caused by the need to use ZF on long-running applications. Over a long time period, substantial quantities of memory errors and/or malloc'ed blocks may have accumulated hindering analysis and possibly overloading the GUI from a memory consumption perspective. Two features are introduced to manage data overloading from ZF's reported memory errors in the GUI. They are the command line options: -ZS and -ZD, also known as: -ZSquelch and
-ZDiscard.Filtered.Messages. It is now possible, with these options to start the GUI in a way that prevents automatic accumulation of error messages. These options are subsequently disabled by user action from the MessageFilter menu options in the GUI, when the user is prepared to begin analyzing incoming messages. The "Logical Heap" option is introduced to help focus leak related user actions in the GUI to malloc'ed blocks of interest. The feature is implemented via the "New Heap" button and the "Heaps" menu in the GUI and with the "New Heap" signaling method outside of the GUI.