Re: Memory Debug Strategy

[Andrew Sveikauskas]

On 2006-05-25 10:18:31 -0400 Richard Stahl <rstahl@cisco.com> wrote:
> What is the general strategy for debugging memory leaks and heap 
> corruption 
> in applications using GNUStep?  Are there any tools available like 
> ObjectAlloc and MallocDebug for MacOS X?

Here's what I find useful based on my experiences:

1. env NSZombieEnabled=1 openapp Whatever

This will make NSObject -dealloc turn all of your deallocated objects 
into instances of the "NSZombie" class, which will print an error 
whenever a method is called.  That is, whenever a deallocated object 
is reused you'll be told about it.

2. If it's an application, a good quick way to find leaks is to 
double-click the icon in the standard about panel.  It will bring up a 
panel which gives some statistics about allocated objects.

3. If you're using Linux on x86, valgrind can do wonders.  Although 
I've found it can be less helpful for GNUstep apps because a lot of 
the stack traces you'll get will be from NSRunLoop and it can 
sometimes be hard to find where the actual problem is.

Andrew