Valgrind is a programming tool for memory debugging, memory leak detection, and profiling.
Valgrind was originally designed to be a free memory debugging tool for Linux on x86, but has since evolved to become a generic framework for creating dynamic analysis tools such as checkers and profilers. It is used by a number of Linux-based projects. Since version 3.5, Valgrind also works on Mac OS X.
The original author of Valgrind is Julian Seward, who in 2006 won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on Valgrind
There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. Valgrind’s architecture is modular, so new tools can be created easily and without disturbing the existing structure.
A number of useful tools are supplied as standard.
Valgrind was originally designed to be a free memory debugging tool for Linux on x86, but has since evolved to become a generic framework for creating dynamic analysis tools such as checkers and profilers. It is used by a number of Linux-based projects. Since version 3.5, Valgrind also works on Mac OS X.
The original author of Valgrind is Julian Seward, who in 2006 won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on Valgrind
There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. Valgrind’s architecture is modular, so new tools can be created easily and without disturbing the existing structure.
A number of useful tools are supplied as standard.
- Memcheck is a memory error detector. It helps you make your programs, particularly those written in C and C++, more correct.
- Cachegrind is a cache and branch-prediction profiler. It helps you make your programs run faster.
- Callgrind is a call-graph generating cache profiler. It has some overlap with Cachegrind, but also gathers some information that Cachegrind does not.
- Helgrind is a thread error detector. It helps you make your multi-threaded programs more correct.
- DRD is also a thread error detector. It is similar to Helgrind but uses different analysis techniques and so may find different problems.
- Massif is a heap profiler. It helps you make your programs use less memory.
- DHAT is a different kind of heap profiler. It helps you understand issues of block lifetimes, block utilisation, and layout inefficiencies.
- Ptrcheck is an experimental heap, stack and global array overrun detector. Its functionality overlaps somewhat with Memcheck’s, but it can find some problems that Memcheck would miss.
- BBV is an experimental SimPoint basic block vector generator. It is useful to people doing computer architecture research and development.
There are also a couple of minor tools that aren’t useful to most users: Lackey is an example tool that illustrates some instrumentation basics; and Nulgrind is the minimal Valgrind tool that does no analysis or instrumentation, and is only useful for testing purposes.