There's plenty of detailed instructions to measure C++ memory usage. (Example links at the bottom)
If I've got a program processing and displaying pixel data, I can use Windows Task Manager to spot memory leakage if processing/displaying/closing multiple files in succession means the executable's Memory (Private working set) grows with each iteration. Yes, not perfect but processing 1000s of frames of data, this works as a quick'n'dirty solution.
To chase down a memory bug in that (large) project, I wrote a program to accurately measure memory usage, using the Lanzelot's useful answer. Namely, the part titled "Total Physical Memory (RAM)". But if I calloc the size of 1 double, I get 577536. Even if that's a quote in bits, that's a lot..
I tried writing a bog standard program to pause, assign some memory (let's say calloc a Megabyte worth of data) and pause again before free'ing said memory. Pause are long enough to let me comfortably look at WTM. Except the executable only grows by 4 K(!) per memory assignment.
What am I missing here? Is QtCreator or the compiler optimising the assigned memory? Why does the big complex project seemingly allow memory usage resolution down to ~1MB, while whatever memory size I fruitlessly fiddle with in my simple program, bare moves the memory shown in Windows Task Manager at all?
C++: Measuring memory usage from within the program, Windows and Linux
https://stackoverflow.com/a/64166/2903608
--- Edit --- Example code, as simple as:
double *pDouble = (double*) calloc(1, sizeof(double)); *pDouble = 5.0; qDebug() << "*pDouble: " << *pDouble;
If I look through WTM, this takes 4K (whether 1, or 1000000 double's). With Lanzelot's solution, north of 500k..