QProcess and memory usage

[ts66]

Hello everybody,

I am just working on program that turns out to have a huge memory leak. In this program I use QProcess to start an external program which is generating data that I process in my program. The external programm writes its output to stdout from where I read it with QProcess::readLine(). Reading is triggered by the QProcess::readyReadStandardOutput() signal. The external program creates up to a few hundred MB of data every second. It looks like QProcess never throws that data away after I read the data from stdout, eating up my systems memory.

Is there a way to free that memory used by QProcess again? But the QProcess has to be active all the time.

Or is there a fundamental flaw with my concept? Did I make obvious mistakes? I want to move to sockets to get the data in the future, but this is not a option now. I have to wait until the developer of the external program is able to do it. Until then I would like to have my program work with passing data via stdout.

Thanks in advance.

(Edit: I am developing on a Linux machine, but I want my program to work on other systems at a later point)