Trackalloc - a lightweight heap profiler

by Travis McLeskey (travis -at- mcleskey -dot- org)

News | Description | Trackalloc vs. the (many) alternatives | Download

News

May 25th, 2004 - Trackalloc 1.0a released (initial release)

Trackalloc wraps the ISO C memory functions with functions that keep records of current allocations. These records can be written to files at selected points in the program under test. The files can then be summarized using the included generate_stats.pl script. Output from this script looks a little like this:

    size of outstanding allocations made at addHashEntry.c:70 (malloc):

    125664 |                 *
           |             ****
           |           ***
           |          ***
           |    *    **
           |   ***  **
           | ***  ***
    106368 |**
           |------------------
            0               50

Trackalloc is especially useful for seeing where and when your program is using and leaking memory.

Trackalloc vs. the (many) alternatives

Pros:

It lets you quickly and visually assess trends in your program's memory usage
It lets you dump the current allocations at a specific point in your program or periodically, instead of just on program exit
It breaks down outstanding allocations by filename and line number where they were made
It is threadsafe (using pthreads), but the threading code can be disabled at compile time
It is very portable and compatible, since it does not use platform-specific features and does not affect memory function calls in linked-in code
It warns about bad frees under normal use
The speed penalty is small
It works with JNI (that's why it was originally written)

Cons:

It is C-only
You must include trackalloc.h in your source files
Your program must be recompiled
There is no detection of bad reads or writes

Download

trackalloc-1.0a.tar.gz
for other downloads, see the project page.