Dleak grew out of frustration, searching for a tool for memory leak detection and inconsistent handling of allocation functions in Linux that satisfies the following criteria:
- No significant impact on memory usage
- No huge impact on runtime performance
- Thread-safe
- Able to handle dynamically loaded shared objects
- Provide a substantial (stack) context where memory was allocated
- If possible, be able to run on unmodified executables
There are zillions of tools for Linux, but none was able to do the job, so I decided to roll my own. It combines some techniques I found in various slides and blogs to wrap the Linux allocation functions and dynamically print stack traces.
There are lots of things that could be improved. To name a few:
- Have a possibilty to inject messages into the log stream from the application
- Add real time stamps
- Add thread information
- Provide a nice graphical display that shows the real time and allows you getting information about the gathered contexts
- Finally, there is heaptrack which is really cool! Seems to do all I was after and provides a nice and fast GUI to dig into the results.
- From the usual classical suspects, I use these when appropriate:
- valgrind. Great. Only, your program gets about 20 times slower. If you can afford that, go for it.
- The gcc/clang
-fsanitize=XXXoptions. Not easy to use, but can do real good work on complicated and CPU hungry programs. - efence is nice for a quick test. As every allocation uses VM though, it doesn't scale for programs doing a lot of small allocations.
Dleak is public domain software. If you have improvements, please send a GitHub pull request.