In C programs, I have sometimes had problems with "weak" memory leaks. By that, I mean that some objects accumulate resources, but, eventually, these objects are destroyed properly and their memory is released, so that these leaks do not show up using the traditional memory debugging tools like valgrind or address sanitizers.

A typical example would be a poorly-written cache that keeps all the cached results from the beginning of the program. It grows forever, but its memory is reclaimed at the end of the program, when the cache is destroyed.

How can one debug this ? Are there tools available to see where are the largest objects allocated by the program ? To dump the current state of allocated memory (including call stack) ? To see which objects are growing ? I'm using Linux, but I am interested in other platforms as well.

CodePudding user response：

If other platforms are an option, I would recommend Visual Studio on Windows.
It has powerful profiling options, including one for memory usage.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/profiling/memory-usage

While debugging you can take a snapshot to see where memory is being used.
You can also take memory usage snapshots at different times and compare them.

CodePudding user response：

You can use a profiler like e.g. Intel VTune (this is available for Linux as well) to trace memory consumption of your application. In VTune, you can see the memory consumption over time, and select a time window to see where memory was allocated during that window.

It still will be difficult to detect such problems if your application allocates and deallocates a lot of memory correctly, and only a small fraction is deallocated too late. In that case you need to check a lot of allocations/deallocations before you can find the bad one(s).