chickadee » lmdb-lolevel » MDB_NOMEMINIT

MDB_NOMEMINITconstant

Don't initialize malloc'd memory before writing to unused spaces in the data file. By default, memory for pages written to the data file is obtained using malloc. While these pages may be reused in subsequent transactions, freshly malloc'd pages will be initialized to zeroes before use. This avoids persisting leftover data from other code (that used the heap and subsequently freed the memory) into the data file. Note that many other system libraries may allocate and free memory from the heap for arbitrary uses. E.g., stdio may use the heap for file I/O buffers. This initialization step has a modest performance cost so some applications may want to disable it using this flag. This option can be a problem for applications which handle sensitive data like passwords, and it makes memory checkers like Valgrind noisy. This flag is not needed with MDB_WRITEMAP, which writes directly to the mmap instead of using malloc for pages. The initialization is also skipped if MDB_RESERVE is used; the caller is expected to overwrite all of the memory that was reserved in that case. This flag may be changed at any time using (mdb-env-set-flags).