Profiling and Memory Checking Tools

Tools for Profiling and Memory Checking

This is a collection of tools for profiling and memory checking. It's mostly a summary of programs/libraries mentioned in the forums, notably in threads "Advice on checking for memory leaks and dangling resources?"/forums/viewthread/1924 and "Other tools for Qt Development":/forums/viewthread/2248/.

Linux, Mac OS X

Valgrind is the tool of choice for analyzing a variety of issues on Linux and Mac OS X. It uses individual tools for specific analysis like profiling and memory checking. Qt Creator's Analyze mode integrates Valgrind, and provides both memory checking and profiling functionality from within the IDE. Valgrind needs to be installed for that to work. Valgrind is not available on Windows, but since memory issues are usually not platform dependent, analysis can be done on Linux or Mac OS X as well.

• "Valgrind":http://valgrind.org/
  There is a tutorial on how to debug C++ code with Valgrind on Linux at http://devmentor.posterous.com/debugging-with-valgrind
• "KCacheGrind":http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/Home.html
  Visualizer for Valgrind profiling results
• "Valkyrie":http://www.valgrind.org/downloads/current.html
  Qt4-based GUI for the Valgrind 3.6.x and 3.7.x series
• "Massif Visualizer":https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/sdk/massif-visualizer
  visualizer for the massif (one of the valgrind tools) output
• "AddressSanitizer":https://blog.qt.io/blog/2013/04/17/using-gccs-4-8-0-address-sanitizer-with-qt/ Memory monitoring tool built into gcc 4.8 and clang

Windows

• "AQTime":http://smartbear.com/products/development-tools/performance-profiling/ (commercial)
  can detect memory leaks, but is mainly for profiling
• "Bounds Checker":http://www.microfocus.com/products/micro-focus-developer/devpartner/index.aspx
• "Deleaker":http://deleaker.com/ (commercial) detects memory, GDI and other leaks
• "Dr.Memory":http://www.drmemory.org/ (Open-source memory monitoring tool)
• "Intel Parallel Inspector":http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-parallel-inspector/ (commercial)
• "Luke Stackwalker":http://lukestackwalker.sourceforge.net/ (Open-source CPU profiler based on sampling)
• "Rational Purify":http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/purify/win/ (commercial)
• "Visual Leak Detector":http://vld.codeplex.com/
• "Very Sleepy":http://www.codersnotes.com/sleepy (Open-source CPU profiler based on sampling)
• Visual Studio Profiler (up to VS 2010 only in the ultimate version, VS 11 will have it in the professional version)