Today I finally had a poke at the memory leak in gnome-cups-icon in Debian. This isn't a little memory leak, its 20 bytes or so every few seconds, which soon adds up to a 600M process when left running overnight. As Valgrind just refused to play along with Bonobo, I had to resort to more hacky measures:

#include <stdlib.h>
static void
print_usage(void)
{
        char buf[256];
        sprintf(buf, "grep VmRSS /proc/%d/status", getpid());
        system(buf);
}

static char *
get_default (void)
{
        ...
        print_usage();
        default_dest = cupsGetDest (NULL, NULL, num_dests, dests);
        print_usage ();
        ...
  

Urrrgh. In the end I traced the leak to cupsFreeDests() not actually freeing any memory, which sucks.