Ask HN: profiling memory - what should we use

Trying to profile the memory on our application. Using Python, have yet to find the winning profiler.

What are you using to test memory leaks?

Any help would be much appreciated.

  • What are you using to test memory leaks?

    I'm not suggesting that this is a good approach or that anyone else should use it, but... I run with ktrace and with MALLOC_OPTIONS=U set in the environment. This logs every single call to malloc(), realloc(), and free(); I then throw the log files at a perl script which matches up allocations with frees and gives me a list of every time memory was allocated without being subsequently freed.

    Of course, this is only feasible because I'm working in C; and I'm sure there are better tools available if I could be bothered to learn how to use them.