Memory leaks

© December 2005 Tony Lawrence

I don't do any C programming any more, but I certainly remember that tracking down memory allocation problems was a large part of my debugging work. Obviously I'm not the only one who makes such programming errors; a Google search in that area will turn up all kinds of tools and debuggers to help track these things down.

Mac OS X has a few command line tools that can help, too. There are graphical tools as well, of course.

malloc_history lists malloc allocations for a program. You set and export a few environment variables, run the suspect program, and then run malloc_history against its pid. Here we look at part of a "vi session":

 $ sudo malloc_history 5146 -all_by_size | head
 1 calls for 131072 bytes: thread_a000ef98 |0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc | 0x5fe68 | 0xa496c | malloc 
 
 1 calls for 4096 bytes: thread_a000ef98 |0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc |
 0x61638 | 0x2a14 | 0x66628 | 0x69b18 | 0x65538 | 0x65e0c | 0x7b3dc
 | malloc
 
 1 calls for 4096 bytes: thread_a000ef98 |0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc |
 0x61638 | 0x2a14 | 0x66688 | 0x69aa4 | 0x65538 | 0x65e0c | 0x7b3dc
 | malloc
 
 1 calls for 4096 bytes: thread_a000ef98 |0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc |
 0x61638 | 0x2a14 | 0x66508 | 0x65538 | 0x65e0c | 0x7b3dc | malloc
 
 1 calls for 4096 bytes: thread_a000ef98 |0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc |
 0x61638 | 0x2afc | 0x4c398 | 0x68bc8 | 0x69aa4 | 0x65538 | 0x65e0c |
 0x7b3dc | malloc
 
 

leaks searches the memory of a process for unreferenced buffers. Again we look at a vi session:

 $ leaks 5573
 Process 5573: 2824 nodes malloced
 Process 5573: 1 leaks
 Leak: 0x00401380  size=16
         0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 
         Call stack: [thread 21fb]: | 0x0 | 0x209c | 0x21fc | 0x60ed0
         | 0xd1078 | 0xd0cf0 | 0x9c530 | 0x7b4c0 | 0x7b3dc | malloc
 
 

vmmap displays the virtual memory of a process. Looking at the same "vi":

 $ vmmap 5573 | grep MALLOC
 MALLOC_LARGE           00187000-001a7000 [  128K] rw-/rwx SM=NUL
 DefaultMallocZone_0x400000
 MALLOC_TINY (freed?)   00200000-00305000 [ 1044K] rw-/rwx SM=COW  
 MALLOC_TINY            00400000-00505000 [ 1044K] rw-/rwx SM=COW  DefaultMallocZone_0x400000
 MALLOC (freed?)        00800000-01008000 [ 8224K] rw-/rwx SM=COW  
 MALLOC                 01800000-02008000 [ 8224K] rw-/rwx SM=COW  DefaultMallocZone_0x400000
 MALLOC                  [  18664K]
 
 

Finally, heap gives us another view of the mallocs for that "vi":

 $ heap 5573
 Process 5573: 1 zones
 Zone DefaultMallocZone_0x400000: Overall size: 9396KB; 2824
 nodes malloced for 576KB (6% of capacity); largest unused:
 [0x0180de00-8168KB]
 All zones: 2824 nodes malloced - 576KB
 
 Zone DefaultMallocZone_0x400000: 2824 nodes - Sizes: 128KB[1]
 8KB[1] 4KB[4] 3584[1] 2560[1] 2048[5] 1536[3] 1024[9] 512[1] 416[1]
 352[1] 336[1] 320[1] 288[3] 256[1] 240[1] 224[2] 208[1778] 192[5]
 176[1] 160[7] 144[3] 128[4] 112[1] 96[11] 80[20] 64[64] 48[44]
 32[227] 16[622]
 
 All zones: 2824 nodes malloced - Sizes: 128KB[1] 8KB[1] 4KB[4]
 3584[1] 2560[1] 2048[5] 1536[3] 1024[9] 512[1] 416[1] 352[1] 336[1]
 320[1] 288[3] 256[1] 240[1] 224[2] 208[1778] 192[5] 176[1] 160[7]
 144[3] 128[4] 112[1] 96[11] 80[20] 64[64] 48[44] 32[227] 16[622]
 
 Can't get the ObjC classes for 5573
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
 <not Objective C object>        = 2824 (588816 bytes)
 
 

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