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Fast and easy memory leak detection

By , 27 Jul 2011
 
Here is how we do at work, it's easy, fast and does not imply either code instrumentation nor external library nor complex manipulations. Simply get LiveHeap, a free tool that displays heap's allocations in live.
 
Put a breakpoint at the very start of your program, and another at the very end of it. Run under a debugger to break at first breakpoint, then launch LiveHeap to monitor your process. Do whatever you want to test your application, then quit. On second breakpoint, just see what resides in LiveHeap to get every heap allocation that is still here. Here are your leaks, with their allocation stack traces.
 
That's all! Easy, isn't it?
 
You might have false positive for allocations that are freed by a static var, like singleton (but anyway, having dynamic memory that is uninitialized by the CRT and not you is crappy and you really should avoid doing this).
 
You can also use this technique on a specific method, or simply monitor memory activity of your application with LiveHeap (or any application) to get an accurate understanding of what's happening.
 
Give it a try, you won't regret!
 
Enjoy!

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GeneralReason for my vote of 2 Nice find, but this is crashing for ...memberLakamraju Raghuram26 Jan '12 - 22:23 
Reason for my vote of 2
Nice find, but this is crashing for VS2010 SP1 and SP2 IDE.
GeneralRe: I think you're facing to the same troubles we can encounter ...memberOctopod26 Jan '12 - 23:13 
I think you're facing to the same troubles we can encounter with VS2008 or other versions. Some applications are more unstable with LiveHeap hooked on them. I'm not sure this is linked to the version of VS.
 
Maybe you could retry without attaching VS2010 debuggee on your application (Ctrl+F5) ?

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