figuring Memory leaks

[Jim]

I got a program in C which takes unusual memory while running. Since I
have not written the program I dont have much idea abt the program
details. One way is obviously going thru the code and verifying.
Leaving this aside, I want to figure out why is this program chewing
so much of memory (sometimes 1 GB). I tried running on Rational Purify
but that simply exits. So can anyone suggest me some ways/ techniuqes
that one should follow for debugging these kind of problems. Do we
have any memory profiling tools that log the memory usage of the
program or a typical funtion. Thanks.. :~

 

[Malcolm]

Leaving this aside, I want to figure out why is this program chewing
so much of memory (sometimes 1 GB). I tried running on Rational Purify
but that simply exits. So can anyone suggest me some ways/ techniuqes
that one should follow for debugging these kind of problems. Do we
have any memory profiling tools that log the memory usage of the
program or a typical funtion. Thanks.. :~

There's no tool that works on all platforms, though there are plenty of leak
detectors on the market that will work with particular compilers.

If you can't find such a tool, there is no ideal way of finding out where
memory is leaking. You can try replacing malloc() with a home-grown function
that does logging (this is the technique we generally use). You can look
though the code - most allocations have a matching free in the same function
so can be discounted, leaving a few potential leaks.