Detecting Illegal Reuse of Memory with Low Resource Impact

A computer program product in a computer-readable medium comprising functional descriptive material that, when executed by a computer, causes the computer to perform actions that include:

• designating one or more deallocated memory regions in a memory space as retained memory regions, wherein the deallocated memory regions may not be reallocated for as long as the deallocated memory regions continue to be designated as retained memory regions;
• computing a memory region retention metric, wherein the memory region retention metric is related to existence of retained memory regions in the memory space;
• determining if the memory region retention metric exceeds a pre-determined threshold;
• and
• in response to a determination that the memory region retention metric exceeds the pre-determined threshold, freeing selected retained memory regions, wherein the freeing causes said selected retained memory regions to no longer be designated as retained memory regions.

A data processing system comprising:

• at least one processor;
• data storage accessible to the at least one processor;
• and
• a set of instructions in the data storage, wherein the at least one processor executes the set of instructions to perform actions that include:
• designating one or more deallocated memory regions in a memory space as retained memory regions,
• wherein the deallocated memory regions may not be reallocated for as long as the deallocated memory regions continue to be designated as retained memory regions;
• computing a memory region retention metric, wherein the memory region retention metric is related to existence of retained memory regions in the memory space;
• determining if the memory region retention metric exceeds a pre-determined threshold;
• and
• in response to a determination that the memory region retention metric exceeds the pre-determined threshold, freeing selected retained memory regions, wherein the freeing causes said selected retained memory regions to no longer be designated as retained memory regions.