I began using boost rather recently and am impressed by the functionality and APIs provided. In using boost::shared_ptr, when I check the program with Valgrind, I found a considerable number of "Still reachable" memory leaks. As per the documentation of Valgrind, these are not a problem. However, since I used to use the standard C++ library only, I always made sure that any program written is completely free from memory leaks. My question is, are these memory leaks something to worry about? I tried using reset(), however it only decrements the reference count, doesn't deallocate memory. Can I safely ignore these, or any way to forcibly deallocate the memory allocated by boost::shared_ptr? Thank you.