How do I find which process is leaking memory

Question

I have a system  Ubuntu  with many processes and one  or more  have a memory leak  Is there a good way to find the process that has the leak  Some of the process are JVMs  some are not  Some are home grown some are open source

User · Answer

Difficult task  I would normally suggest to grab a debugger memory profiler like Valgrind and run the programs one after one in it  Soon or later you will find the program that leaks and can tell it the devloper or fix it yourself

User · Answer

I suggest the use of htop  as a better alternative to top

User · Answer

if the program leaks over a long time  top might not be practical  I would write a simple shell scripts that appends the result of  ps aux  to a file every X seconds  depending on how long it takes to leak significant amounts of memory  Something like   while true do echo  ---------------------------------   gt  gt   tmp mem usage date  gt  gt   tmp mem usage ps aux  gt  gt   tmp mem usage sleep 60 done

User · Answer

As suggeseted  the way to go is valgrind  It s a profiler that checks many aspects of the running performance of your application  including the usage of memory   Running your application through Valgrind will allow you to verify if you forget to release memory allocated with malloc  if you free the same memory twice etc

User · Answer

In addition to top  you can use System Monitor  System - Administration - System Monitor  then select Processes tab   Select View - All Processes  go to Edit - Preferences and enable Virtual Memory column  Sort either by this column  or by Memory column

User · Answer

You can run the top command  to run non-interactively  type top -b -n 1    To see applications which are leaking memory  look at the following columns    RPRVT - resident private address space size RSHRD - resident shared address space size RSIZE - resident memory size VPRVT - private address space size VSIZE - total memory size

User · Answer

I suggest the use of htop  as a better alternative to top

User · Answer

If you can t do it deductively  consider the Signal Flare debugging pattern  Increase the amount of memory allocated by one process by a factor of ten   Then run your program   If the amount of the memory leaked is the same  that process was not the source of the leak  restore the process and make the same modification to the next process   When you hit the process that is responsible  you ll see the size of your memory leak jump  the  signal flare     You can narrow it down still further by selectively increasing the allocation size of separate statements within this process

[linux] How do I find which process is leaking memory?

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