My first approach was to search for leaks with Valgrind and i didn't find any. Also i never mentioned any leaks, so that's not my concern. The only problem i had/have is, that the RSS is not decreasing during runtime, even after a long time when my application is not using the allocated memory anymore. For instance i connected 30.000 dummy clients to my server, so the memory consumption went up to ~ 50% of my available memory. Then i disconnected them (leading to a lot of destructed objects), which should lead to a lot of freed memory. But my application still claims 50% of my RAM, according to RSS. If i now connect another 30.000 clients, my RSS changes only marginally. But i cannot understand, why my application never releases any of the claimed memory to the OS. It feels like there is some kind of a capacity inside the application (a map-like container for instance), which can only increase and will never decrease. Since its capacity does never decrease, the claimed memory won't be released. @Oswin Krause It's more of a practical concern. Since i never observed my OS 'reclaiming' the virtual pages, i don't know if this will ever happen. All i observed, is that my application claimed some memory and never released it (or at least only an alternating small portion of it). -- View this message in context: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Memory-deallocation-concerning-boost-bind... Sent from the Boost - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.