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Sunday February 20, 2005

DTrace & finding C++ Memory Leaks
The developers.sun.com site has an excellent article written by Jay Danielsen on Using DTrace to Profile and Debug A C++ Program. Well worth ten minutes of your time.
(2005-02-20 14:19:33.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/fintanr/entry/dtrace_finding_c_memory_leaks

Comments:

As much as I love Solaris, DTrace, and I even tolerate C++ programming, I have to say this article simply proves that Purify (an expensive, proprietary memory-leak tool) is worth every penny. I've had no link to this product in the 10+ years I've been using (Pure Software, Rational, now IBM), by the way. There's no need for an article on how to find this simple kind of memory leak when using Purify. You'd just relink using 'purify CC ...' instead of 'CC ...' as the link command. Then you'd just run your program and scroll through the diagnostics window. When it found the leak, a few clicks would place you directly at the site of leak in the code, and also tell you where that block of memory was allocated. Chris Morgan

Posted by Chris Morgan on February 21, 2005 at 06:15 PM GMT #

Hi Chris,
no disagreement with you in terms of within a development environment, if I had purify in my available tool box while working on something like this I would reach for it first time round as well. But would this work in a production environment?, the performance impact of purify is known to be pretty high, and you would need to redploy your application.... <p /> The thing about this article is that all of the tools used can be used while your production environment is up and running. The memory leak in itself is just an example. <p />

Posted by fintanr on February 21, 2005 at 10:39 PM GMT #