Memory Leak debugging tool on AIX

[rtang]

Hi,

What kind of tools are avilable to help debug memory leak
problems on AIX? I have a multi-threaded process that I
observed its memory size keeps growing on AIX; however,
I didn't notice the memory size growing on Solaris and HP.

Purify from Rational worked very well for memory leak debugging. However, Purify is not available on AIX.

I have evaluated ZeroFault and Ensure+ from Parasoft. But it seems Ensure+ didn't handle the multi-thread issue correctly and ZeroFault is not a practical tool for a heavy
duty server side process. (Hope I am wrong and I am not
using ZeroFault correctly!)

Any info on how to tackle the memory leak problems on AIX?
What other tools are available, or any success experience with ZeroFault. Thanks in advance.

-RT

 

[aixat]

Hello,
Why do you think you have memory leak.
put output of vmstat 1 5 and lsps -a, and lsps -s.

 

[dobbyn]

Here's an old list that I've used in the past... Insure++ is the only tool I've used on AIX.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/zorn/public_html/MallocDebug.html

 

[rtang]

The way I determine there's a memory leak is:

I had a script to run /bin/ps evx on that process every
30 seconds and and find the SIZE(6th column, which shows
its data segment size) keeps growing. It started at around 10M and it started incrementing 4k(one page) once several minutes. After running it for several days. The SIZE
becomes around 100M.

 

[aixat]

Hello,
if you run vmstat command and look at fre column what value do you see.

In vmstat output the fre column is the free memory pages and each page has a size of 4k.

The process takes memory and when the process is killed then there is no memory leak. The memory is working as design.

What level of AIX you are running. install latest level bos.rte.libc and bos.rte.libpthreads.

There was a memory leak that was fixed by this two filesets.

 

[aixat]

Hello,
The whole memory leak issue is a mute point.

I read the man on ps command and 6th column size
size - the virtual size(paging space) of the data section of the process in 1 kb units. equal to no of working segments pages of the process that have been touched times four.

IF SEVERAL WORKING SEGMENT PAGES ARE CURRENTLY PAGED OUT, THIS NUMBER IS LARGER THEN THE AMOUNT OF REAL MEMORY BEING USED.
size includes pages in private segment and shared library data segments of the process.

do lsps -s command and see what percent paging is used when the process is running.

kill the process after 60 seconds check the paging space.