Tracking memory leaks tips - Solaris

veryangryman · 10-02-2009 10:53am #1

Hi all (experienced testers especially :pac:),

Any tips for this - trying to troubleshoot what may cause memory leaks. I know of top and prstat - am running them in crontab every 10 mins to get snapshots, as well as RSS memory stats from prstat -p

Is there any other tips you can offer

Tobias Greeshman · 10-02-2009 11:11am

Do you have access to Purify? If so that would be very beneficial for tracing down the leak.

Talon.ie · 10-02-2009 11:48am

Hi,
There's a couple of options available to you. Purify is a good one, but I hear it's pricey.

You can use libumem as well. It ships with Solaris 9. It's an alternative memory allocator that can replace the standard malloc. You don't need to re-compile, just LD_PRELOAD it. Basically it'll spot a memory leak, write out a description/error report and then abort. Read this for more info http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/libumem_library.html. One added benefit of libumem is that it can seriously outperform the standard malloc in a multithreaded app. (though it can be slower in a single threaded app). The usual performance related rules apply (measure, measure, measure)

You can also use DTrace if you've got it. You'll find an article about it here. http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html

daymobrew · 10-02-2009 12:41pm

Talon.ie wrote: »

You can also use DTrace if you've got it. You'll find an article about it here. http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html

DTrace is the business! It gives you amazing access to system info - for example, you could have it record all calls to malloc and free which might give you info about a mismatch of those calls.

I never had a need but colleagues use it all the time.
You could look at the DTrace Community and its forum on opensolaris.org.

Tracking memory leaks tips - Solaris

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