Postmortem Memory Profiling with Perl

Irish writes "Problems with memory, such as leaks and memory-greedy applications can cause many problems for application developers; more so for wireless applications due to the prevalence of memory-constrained devices as platforms. This article shows you how to avoid memory problems and it shows how to use Perl script to analyze memory issues for later repair. It offers three progressively more sophisticated solutions to demonstrate the concept."

What you learn from reading the title, only:

[dk.r*nger]

When you die, the coroner can now attach a Perl program to your brain and find out what you were thinking.

CSI is going to be very boring now.

Re:What you learn from reading the title, only:

[treat]

I saw a movie where they could do this. It seems plausible. I'm sure they would have to cut the brain up into little pieces. Do we know how much of the brain degrades soon after death to be able to judge whether this is possible in theory?

Isn't it ironic?

[Linux_ho]

Using Perl to fix memory problems.

Re:Isn't it ironic?

[William G. Davis]

No, it isn't. It would be ironic if Perl itself, the interpreter, was full of memory leaks and buffer overflows or if the language forced you to do your own error-prone memory management, but neither of which is the case.

Perl, the interpreter, is one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used, virtually devoid of buffer overflows and memory leaks, and it takes care of all of the memory management for you.

Re:Isn't it ironic?

[Linux_ho]

No, it isn't. It would be ironic if Perl itself, the interpreter, was full of memory leaks and buffer overflows or if the language forced you to do your own error-prone memory management, but neither of which is the case.

Perl, the interpreter, is one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used, virtually devoid of buffer overflows and memory leaks, and it takes care of all of the memory management for you.

I agree that the interpreter is very stable and has very few problems. I like Perl quite a

Re:Isn't it ironic?

[William G. Davis]

But I still think it's ironic. I wouldn't exactly call Perl processes lightweight.

Neither would I, but that still doesn't make it ironic [everything2.com].

$ make sense

Excuse me..

[MooCows]

But what is the big deal here?
We've had this kind of memory leak tracing for ages (simple C++ macro's to wrap around 'new' and 'delete' is one example)
Ok, so we're doing it externally with perl now, yay.

And by the way:
... could be achieved in C by replacing the allocate calls with a macro that inserts the filename and line number. Alternatively, add a parameter (string/number) to the allocate function and then preprocess the source with an external tool (PERL script, for example) that puts a unique value in each call to a memory function.

If you need to edit the source, then why use an external script in the first place?

Reinventing the wheel

[isj]

The author has reinvented the wheel. Any debug heap that provides a trace can do this, so this is basically an old hat.
http://www.cbmamiga.demon.co.uk/mpatrol/mpat rol_83 .html provides a very good list of resources for debug heaps.