[gdal-dev] memory leak in hdf driver

[Vincent Schut]

Vincent Schut wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm afraid I've encountered a memory leak in the hdf driver.
> Context: because of massive parallel (cluster) processing, I'm reusing 
> a python instance for lots of jobs. Some of these jobs use gdal to 
> read and/or save data. In some cases, I saw the memory use of my 
> python worker processes grow with each job, until the whole lot got 
> killed. I've got 8 gig on that server :-). I've been able to track 
> down the leak to the use of gdal.Open on a hdf (modis) dataset. I 
> guess this means that either the gdal hdf driver or libhdf4 has the leak.

For the record and possible future googlers: this appeared to be a leak 
in libhdf4.2r2; upgrading to 4.2r4 fixed the issue.

Vincent.