MemProf-ing programs with garbage collectors

[Thomas Aeby <aeby graeff com>]

Hello!

I've just had a look at MemProf again and have seen it tremendously
advance (well, I've seen 0.4.1 and tried it against a multithreaded
program with no success, before ... 0.5.1 works nicely, now!).

Well, my problem now is that I'm trying to profile a program using a
garbage collector (actually it's a gcj compiled program with boehm-GC).
Now the two problems I ran into are:

  1) MemProf seems to break garbage collection. Is this due to MemProf
     also using Boehm GC for leak detection? Is there a way around this?

  2) In a program with garbage collection memory leaks are not those
     pieces of memory which would be garbage collected if we had a
     garbage collector (the Boehm approach), BUT the pieces of memory
     that cannot be freed by the garbage collector though they are not
     in use any more. Well, I don't think there is some automated
     way of detecting these, but it implies I'm not really interested
     in the objects being in the "red" part of MemProf watched memory,
     but rather in those in the "yellow" part.

Has anyone ever tried to use MemProf as I'm doing and has found the
answers to this two items? Are there any plans for supporting programs
with garbage collection?

Maybe, if there's no one I'll try hacking around in the source a little
(but won't have too much time to spend on this the next few weeks).

Best regards,
Tom
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