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Re: Mem Leak Tracer (monitored malloc)



Thanks a lot, Shlomi/Yedidya/Vlad/Oleg (though others are still welcome
to contribute from their experience too...)

Mid-Summary:
============
Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:

> I never used any of them, so I can't comment.
>
> For my needs, ElectricFence is good enough. It is tiny, I understand

As I wrote, the long list that I wrote, was not the full list. One of
the options in the full list, was Electric Fence. I Omited it because
it seemed to be hardware dependent, and I want to keep the option to
use it under other platforms (SPARC?) in the future.

Some of the tools that I mentioned, depend on platform too, but not too
much (i.e. some depend on GCC, but you can use GCC under almost any
UNIX).

Anyway, your description of Electric Fence looks very convincing, and
if hardware really prevents me from using it, it's too bad...

Vlad wrote:

> i have tried a lot of malloc debuggers and i can recommend dmalloc it's very 
> good for finding leaks and validate pointers , but if you want simple and 
> clear reporting try using memprof ( you can find it on freshmeat) it has a
> very good gtk gui for reporting leaks and profiling , but unfortunally they 
> doesn't work well with threads

I was not aware of memprof...
Seems that my search in freshmeat, although it brought zillion results,
was not full anough...
I'll take a look at it!

> In the past I found it very useful to compile with ParaSoft's Insure
> during development. It flushes an enormous quantity of subtle
> problems.  It is not OSS, and costs quite a bit of money, but it is
> worth considering for a company. I don't remember what the cost or the
> exact license terms were (IIRC it was a site licence for multiple
> developers), but it should be easy to find out from
> http://www.parasoft.com (NB: URL from memory), or from Linux-IL
> members who are using it.

Looks good, but if I decide to buy a product, I believe I'll put my
money on Purify.

Regarding dmalloc:

Almost all of you mentioned it.

It is for sure the most veteran, and probably the most professional.
I've failed to use it so far, probably because of mistakes of me.
However, it looks strange that there are so many steps and
customizations that user (I, in my case) must do. It's complex, hard to
install, even further to link to the application, in most of the cases
you must patch the source of your app to use it, then conflicts with
the libraries, with flags, and with what not, and even after succeeding
to pass all these steps, it crashes.

Maybe it's me, but I've failed to use it so far. Maybe I'll give it one
more try.

By the way: njadm conflicted too, and even entered into an infinite fork
loop (eating all my available processes), but before of it, it found a
real bug of me! (not a memory leak, but an overflow of one byte from a
malloc'ed buffer).

Thanks again all of you,
-- 
Eli Marmor
marmor@netmask.it
CTO, Founder
Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd.
__________________________________________________________
Tel.:   +972-9-766-1020          8 Yad-Harutzim St.
Fax.:   +972-9-766-1314          P.O.B. 7004
Mobile: +972-50-23-7338          Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel

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