Re: Memprof equivalent?

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

Eric M. Monsler wrote:

> Unfortunately, I am developing with gtk under Solaris, and so memprof,
> which claims to require Linux 2.2 or better, does not seem like a usable
> tool for me.
> 
> What else do people use and recommend, for free software memory
> checking?

Depends. The best solution is probably Purify, available from
http://www.rational.com. Last time I looked, one could download the
software and a trial licence for 2 weeks. I don't know if discounts
are available.

The next choice would be Sun's dbx, available in their Forte compiler
suite (not as a separate product, but comes with every compiler).
The relevant commands are `check -leaks' and `check -access'.
There is also a library which contains garbage collector for C and C++
together with some debugging abilities, but I've never used it, so
I can't comment off-hand.

It's downloadable somewhere from http://www.sun.com, together with 30 days
trial licence. If you are in some educational institution, the price for
the full compiler suite is either zero or media cost (in case you don't
want to download it).

If you are in a company which can qualify as a Solaris developer, you can
get a discount on hardware and the compiler suite would come with every
machine purchased that way (one year single user licence). If you don't
want to buy hardware I think you can get discount on software alone, but
it won't be zero cost.

Other commercial software exists; search the web if you're interested.

If you can't afford anything, then you have watchmalloc library
included in Solaris (see the man page). Running programs that way is
rather slow and I don't know if the library is good, because I've never
used it.

I suppose that Electric Fence (or some other free malloc debugging library)
would work fine on Solaris, but I've never used it, so I can't comment.

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