I am supporting a C/Cpp application and have resolved few memory leak issues by creating objects. Since it is provided by the third party API, it is told that the objects gets destructed by the API itself.
I could manage to fix the issue and test my application without any issue. But i still doubt my fix for memory leak. I want to do profiling and i am in need of a Cpp tool that can tell me if there are chances of memory leaks in the code given a CPP file.
Is there a tool of that sort? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
~Jegan
You are probably looking for a dynamic analysis tools, not a profile. For Linux, there's valgrind. For windows some good commercial solutions are Purify and Insure++.
Give valgrind a try, it's by far the best memory analysis tool I've come across. It only runs on *nix, but you haven't stated your platform.
We're using MemoryValidator from http://www.softwareverify.com/.
It provides a fully functional 30 day trial, so you can test it before buying.
Single license from 179$ (each for 10 licenses), up to 299$ (1 license). And it is really worth it's price. Enables you to find the cause for leaks within a minute.
Also check the other tools they're providing: performance validator, bug validator and so on.
Great tool once you know how to handle it :-)
Related
I have an application that runs on an embedded processor (ARM), and I'd like to profile the application to get an idea of where it's using system resources, like CPU, memory, IO, etc. The application is running on top of Linux, so I'm assuming there's a number of profiling applications available. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!
edit: I should also add the version of Linux we're using is somewhat old (2.6.18). Unfortunately I don't have a lot of control over that right now.
As bobah said, gprof and valgrind are useful. You might also want to try OProfile. If your application is in C++ (as indicated by the tags), you might want to consider disabling exceptions (if your compiler lets you) and avoiding dynamic casts, as mentioned above by sashang. See also Embedded C++.
if your Linux is not very limited then you may find gprof and valgrind useful
On a related note, the C++ working group did a technical report on the performance cost of various C++ language features. For example they analyze the cost of dynamic_casting one or 2 levels deep. The reports here http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/TR18015.pdf and it might give you some insight into where the pain points in your embedded application might be.
gprof may disappoint you.
Assuming the program you are testing is big enough to be useful, then chances are the call tree could be pruned, so the best opportunities for optimization are function/method calls that you can remove or avoid. That link shows a good way to find them.
Many people approach this as sort of a hierarchical sleuthing process of measuring times.
Or you can simply catch it in the act, which is what I do.
Any suggestions? This SO post talks about Visual Leak Detector, but I'm looking for other tools. Also, please don't recommend this.
I've used Visual Leak Detector quite recently and it works pretty well. It's very simple to build it in (just include vld.h) and doesn't require any instrumentation. I found that I needed to write a couple of scripts though to parse the output into something more useful for my purposes (it is crying out for a decent GUI). Note the new website -- the project is being actively maintained on Codeplex -- the Codeproject link is very old.
Try Deleaker or DevPartner, these both are good enough.
update:
C++ Memory Validator, works fine and fairly priced.
If you can afford some money use the Intel Parallel Inspector (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/oneapi/inspector.html).
It doesn't require any code modifications and provides good reports.
I had to look for good tools to do that in work and that's the best tool (by far) that I found.
As suggested by Noah Roberts, i too felt Memory validator as the best tool for detecting leaks in Visual studio.
Purify also works.
Asked a similar question not long ago but related to 2010 specifically: VS2010 profiler/leak detection
If you're not using 2010 you might consider AQtime. It's not too terrible most the time. There are times thought when it fails to find an object related to the leak and just says "crt memory" or whatever.
Another I recently tried is called "Memory Validator". Not exactly a nice interface but it does seem to work, and work with 2010 too (just doesn't have any other kind of profiling in it, which is something I expect in a commercial tool like that).
Maybe GlowCode as was mentioned in other, similar questions, on SO when I searched before asking.
There is also application verifier. It can track a whole bunch of other issues as well apart from leaks like places where you forget to free win32 objects such as handles etc ...
The MSDN link is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms220948(VS.80).aspx
Jacob, the BoundsChecker tool inside DevPartner Studio contains two types of leak detectors for VC++. The uninstrumented version will tabulate leaks at process shutdown. The compile time instrumented detector will break on leaks at the time the leak occurrs showing both the current call stack at the point of leakage, and the allocation stack trace showing where the leaking memory was allocated. The 64-bit version of DPS and BoundsChecker 10.5 ships February 4, 2011 with x64 application support for Visual Studio 2010, 2008, and 2005. We also have a new pricing model so you can license just the BoundsChecker features and ugrade to the full DPS suite only if you find you need the other profilers or static analysis capabilities later on. Be sure to haggle with your sales rep too. Paying list price is like paying sticker price on a new car. Shameless plug: I work on the DevPartner team. DPS 10.5 represents my team's biggest release of tech capability since Compuware closed the NuMega lab. Please evaluate it for your own application and tech stack when 10.5 goes live. Cheers. Matt Schuetze, DevPartner Product Owner (and yes that means PO in normal Scrum team roles.)
VLD cannot be trusted for more serious projects.
Intel has a good tool called Inspector.
After 3 days searching for a good tool to find leaks on x64 binaries with C++ in Visual Studio, this is the only good option I found.
Try Dr.Memory.
They have proper visual studio integration and documentation is excellent.
Easy to use too.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/diagnostic/
http://diagnostic.sourceforge.net/index.html
I had tried so many memory leak detectors that it's difficult to count them all. Some of them crashed, some of them produced invalid results, some of them simply did not help. Eventually I've made my own leak detector, but invested so much effort into it - so made it non-free for time being. Managed / native / 32 & 64-bit architectures supported.
If you ever want to develop this tool further, please feel free to contact me.
Does anyone know where I can find a memory memory leak detection tool for C++ which can be either run in a command line or as an Eclipse plug-in in Windows and Linux. I would like it to be easy to use. Preferably one that doesn't overwrite new(), delete(), malloc() or free(). Something like GDB if its gonna be in the command line, but I don't remember that being used for detecting memory leaks. If there is a unit testing framework which does this automatically, that would be great.
This question is similar to other questions (such as Memory leak detection under Windows for GNU C/C++ ) however I feel it is different because those ask for windows specific solutions or have solutions which I would rather avoid. I feel I am looking for something a bit more specific here. Suggestions don't have to fulfill all requirements, but as many as possible would be nice.
Thanks.
EDIT: Since this has come up, by "overwrite" I mean anything which requires me to #include a library or which otherwise changes how C++ compiles my code, if it does this at run time so that running the code in a different environment won't affect anything that would be great. Also, unfortunately, I don't have a Mac, so any suggestions for that are unhelpful, but thank you for trying. My desktop runs Windows (I have Linux installed but my dual monitors don't work with it) and I'd rather not run Linux in a VM, although that is certainly an option. My laptop runs Linux, so I can use that tool on there, although I would definitely prefer sticking to my desktop as the screen space is excellent for keeping all of the design documentation and requirements in view without having to move too much around on the desktop.
NOTE: While I may try answers, I won't mark one as accepted until I have tried the suggestion and it is satisfactory.
EDIT2: I'm not worried about the cross-platform compatibility of my code, it's a command line application using just the C++ libraries.
Valgrind is your best friend. Valgrind has a plugin for eclipse.
"Sadly" Valgrind does not run on Windows, but it runs on Mac OSX, *BSD and Linux, so I'd consider that "multi-platform". :)
Valgrind does "overwrite" new/delete/malloc/free but not during compilation (so you don't have to recompile if that's what you mean). It interprets the binary so the performance suffer a bit during testing.
In newer versions of gcc there is something called leak sanitizer. You just have to add -fsanitize=leak to compile command. Then you run your program normally and at the end, if there was any leak, you'll get summary (in terminal of course).
for 32 bits applications, valgrind + wine can be a working solution as well for windows apps. If your app can be run under wine without any change, then running it under valgrind + wine works well in my (quite limited) experience. Since your app works under Linux, I would guess that your app is likely to run under wine (avoids very windows specific code which is not yet supported in wine).
DUMA is a cross-platform leak detection library which I use for many of my projects. It's nice because you don't have to #include any DUMA-specific header, but just link in the library before you link in your system's libc, which contains the memory allocation routines, and after linking in libstdc++.
It can be kind of tricky to set up, especially when used with C++ projects, but I think that it is well worth the time invested. It has helped me to find a few memory leaks before that I might not have discovered otherwise, and one case where I deleted an allocation twice.
One note: it's much easier if you build a static archive (built by default on Windows) because it helps to reduce "false positives" that are actually caused by leaky runtimes.
There's the leaks tool on MacOS X (i don't know if it exists elsewhere) and i used to use a tool called memprof on linux. There's also valgrind which works on linux and is incredibly awesome but has a substantial performance hit, and ostensibly on macos but i haven't tried it.
I am unaware of any such tools on windows however.
While you mentioned that this isn't preferred the Boehm Garbage Collector can be used to detect memory leaks. Simply put, if the garbage collector is ever actually running then generally you have a memory leak. It's used this way by Mozilla to detect memory leaks in Firefox.
Can anybody recommend a good code profiler for C++?
I came across Shiny - any good? http://sourceforge.net/projects/shinyprofiler/
Callgrind for Unix/Linux
DevPartner for Windows
Not C++ specific, but AMD's CodeAnalyst software is free and is feature-packed.
http://developer.amd.com/cpu/codeanalyst/codeanalystwindows/Pages/default.aspx
Gprof if you use gcc. It may not be user friendly but still useful.
Probably you will be interested in Intel VTune. Rather useful and allows to collect low-level events like cache misses which helps a lot in tuning.
Quantify (part of the IBM/Rational PurifyPlus package) is a very good profiler, but not exactly cheap. It is available on several platforms, too - I've used it on Solaris, Windows and Linux.
Depends on what you need to do:
Measure, so you can do regressions testing to see if changes in performance happened.
Find reasons for suboptimal performance and optimize them.
These are not the same.
For 1, use one of the recommended profilers.
For 2, the profiler I much prefer is one you already have:
http://www.wikihow.com/Optimize-Your-Program%27s-Performance
To see how this goes, check this out.
For C++, as for C# and any language that encourages layers of abstraction, those layers may or may not be good from a software engineering standpoint, but they can kill performance. Every method call is a detour in the execution of your program, and the style encourages you to nest those things, sometimes needlessly. Also the style discourages you from knowing or caring what goes on inside them. You may find them creating and deleting objects underneath at a rate and level of generality far beyond what your application really needs.
AQtime (for Windows)
If you are running a Premium version of VS 2010 then you get a profiler with it.
I've also used a couple of other free ones, but they don't compare to the on MS ships. Useful as a second opinion though.
If you have access to a Mac, then I recommend using Shark from the CHUD tools.
You can use the analyzer that´s in Sun Studio 12 on Linux or Solaris. Itś free. http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/index.jsp
If you cannot locate DevPartner it is because we've moved under new ownership. Check us out on the Micro Focus website: http://www.microfocus.com/products/micro-focus-developer/devpartner/index.aspx. Shameless plug: I work on the DevPartner team. Our long awaited 64-bit versions of BoundsChecker and C++/.NET profilers ship on February 4, 2011. We've changed our pricing model so you can choose either the whole suite or just the performance profiler if that's what you need. Please check out the new DPS 10.5 release when it goes live!
What good profilers do you know?
What is a good way to measure and tweak the performance of a C++ MFC application?
Is Analysis of algorithms really neccesary? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm_analysis
I strongly recommend AQTime if you are staying on the Windows platform. It comes with a load of profilers, including static code analysis, and works with most important Windows compilers and systems, including Visual C++, .NET, Delphi, Borland C++, Intel C++ and even gcc. And it integrates into Visual Studio, but can also be used standalone. I love it.
If you're (still) using Visual C++ 6.0, I suggest using the built-in profiler. For more recent versions you could try Compuware DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.
For Windows, check out Xperf which ships free with the Windows SDK. It uses sampled profile, has some useful UI, & does not require instrumentation. Quite useful for tracking down performance problems. You can answer questions like:
Who is using the most CPU? Drill down to function name using call stacks.
Who is allocating the most memory?
Who is doing the most registry queries?
Disk writes? etc.
You will be quite surprised when you find the bottlenecks, as they are probably not where you expected!
It's been a while since I profiled unmanaged code, but when I did I had good results with Intel's vtune. I'm sure somebody else will tell us if that's been overtaken.
Algorithmic analysis has the potential to improve your performance more profoundly than anything you'll find with a profiler, but only for certain classes of application. If you operate over reasonably large sets of data, algorithmic analysis might find ways to be more efficient in CPU/Memory/both, but if your app is mainly form-fill with a relational database for storage, it might not offer you much.
Intel Thread Checker via Vtune performance analyzer- Check this picture for the view i use the most that tells me which function eats up the most of my time.
I can further drill down inside and decompose which functions inside them eats up more time etc. There are different views based on what you are watching (total time = time within fn + children), self time (time spent only in code running inside the function etc).
This tool does a lot more than profiling but i haven't explored them all. I would definitely recommend it. The tool is also available for downloading as a fully functional trial version that can run for 30 days. If you have cost constraints, i would say this window is all that you require to pin point your problem.
Trial download here - https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/AutoGen.aspx?ProductID=907&AccountID=&ProgramID=&RequestDt=&rm=EVAL&lang=
ps : I have also played with Rational Rational but for some reason I did not take much to it. I suspect Rational might be more expensive than Intel too.
Tools (like true time from DevPartner) that let you see hit counts for source lines let you quickly find algorithms that have bad 'Big O' complexity. You still have to analyse the algorithm to determine how to reduce the complexity.
I second AQTime, having both AQTime and Compuwares DevPartner, for most cases. The reason being that AQTime will profile any executable that has a valid PDB file, whereas TrueTime requires you to make an instrumented build. This greatly speeds up and simplifies ad hoc profiling. DevPartner is also quite a bit more expensive if this is an issue. Where DevPartner comes into its own is with BoundsChecker, which I still rate as a better tool for catching leaks and overwrites than AQTimes execution profiler. TrueTime can be slighly more accurate than AQTime, but I have never found this to be an issue.
Is profiling worthwhile, IMO yes, if you need performance gains on a local application. I think you also learn a lot about how your program and algorithms really work, and the cost implications of using certain types of object classes for storing and iterating through your data.
Glowcode is a very nice profiler (when it works). It can attach to a running program and requires only symbol files - you don't need to rebuild.
Some versions pf visual studio 2005 (and maybe 2008) actually come with a pretty good performance profiler.
if you have it it should be available under the tools menu
or you can search for a way to open the "performance explorer" window to start a new performance session.
A link to MSDN
FYI, Some versions of Visual Studio only come with a non-optimizing compiler. For one of my my MFC apps if I compile it with MINGW/MSYS ( gcc compiler ) with -o3 then it runs about 5-10x as fast as my release compile with Visual Studio.
For example I have an openstreetmap xml compiler and it takes about 3 minutes ( the gcc compiled version) to process a 2.7GB xml file. My visual studio compile of the same code takes about 18 minutes to run.