3.7.3. Valgrind

Valgrind provides a number of detection and profiling tools to help improve the performance and correctness of your applications. These tools can detect memory and thread-related errors as well as heap, stack and array overruns, allowing you to easily locate and correct errors in your application code. They can also profile the cache, the heap, and branch-prediction to identify factors that may increase application speed and minimize application memory use.

Valgrind analyzes your application by running it on a synthetic CPU and instrumenting the existing application code as it is executed. It then prints "commentary" clearly identifying each process involved in application execution to a user-specified file descriptor, file, or network socket. The level of instrumentation varies depending on the Valgrind tool in use, and its settings, but it is important to note that executing the instrumented code can take 4-50 times longer than normal execution.

Valgrind can be used on your application as-is, without recompiling. However, because Valgrind uses debugging information to pinpoint issues in your code, if your application and support libraries were not compiled with debugging information enabled, recompiling to include this information is highly recommended.

As of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Valgrind integrates with gdb (GNU Project Debugger) to improve debugging efficiency.

More information about Valgrind is available from the Developer Guide, available from http://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/, or by using the man valgrind command when the valgrind package is installed. Accompanying documentation can also be found in:

For information about how Valgrind can be used to profile system memory, refer to Section 5.3, “Using Valgrind to Profile Memory Usage”.