What can cause section handle leaks?

Question

This is a follow-up question to my previous question.

As suggested in this answer to my previous question, I used ProcessExplorer to analyze a list of handles that my application is using to find a handle leak.

The handles that are leaking are of type Section.

What exactly is a section handle, where is it used and what can cause section handles to leak?

I'm not using memory mapped files in my code.

Answer 1

Quoting Mark Russinovich's Inside Windows 2000 (what is now called Windows Internals),

The section object, which the Win32 subsystem calls a file mapping object, represents a block of memory that two or more processes can share.

So, it's a memory mapped file. They'd leak if you created a memory mapped file and failed to close it. Pretty hard to be much more specific.

Answer 2

A memory mapped file not associated with a file handle can be used for IPC (communication between process). If you do not use them directly, perhaps one of your unit or component is doing some IPC communication. It is very likely that you use a component to connect to another process, and do not release it as requested.

First action to be taken is to track for any memory leak (using FastMM4 debug mode), and you'll certainly find some un-released objects in your code.

Since handles are commonly allocated by objects, from my experiment, resolving all memory leaks will resolve handle leaks.

If you do not have any memory leak, there is some CreateFileMapping() calls to check for a corresponding CloseHandle() in all your source code (including third-party source).

Answer 3

It turns out that the problem was in a low-level function that counts the number of threads of the current process. This function used the

CreateToolhelp32Snapshot

API function which returns a handle, which was not closed properly. I am not sure why this produces a section handle leak though.

Answer 4

The section handle leak in .net is due to the Microsoft Hotfix KB2670838. Uninstall this update and the section handle leak issue (Out of Memory) will be fixed.

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