LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.

POSIX Thread Memory Leaks.

For years, I've been hunting down some nasty memory leaks in the applications I've been using.  The code for the most part is inherited and I haven't been able to wrap my head around it.  This latest discovery though after reading some documentation and code has given me something to chase.

Tracking down memory leaks from multi-threaded applications is a nightmare, but I'm seeing some rational logic behind it now based on this IBM article on POSIX threads.

And I quote:

If you create a joinable thread but forget to join it, its resources or private memory are always kept in the process space and never reclaimed. Always join the joinable threads; by not joining them, you risk serious memory leaks.

Well, I'll be damned!