A dynamic memory measuring tool for C++ programs

Dynamic memory management has been a high cost component in many software systems. A study has shown that memory intensive C programs can consume up to 30% of the program run time in memory allocation and liberation. Especially, in C++ programs, they tend to have object creation and deletion prolifically. The C++ memory allocation rate can be as much as ten times higher than the comparable applications written in C. Despite the importance of dynamic memory management in C++, there exist few software tools to study dynamic memory in C++. This paper introduces a tracing tool, called mtrace++, to study the dynamic memory allocation behavior in C++ programs. mtrace++ is a source code level instrumented tracing tool which produces records of allocation and deallocation information. mtrace++ identifies the origins of allocated memories and life-spans of objects. With limited overheads, mtrace++ can help programmers to solve dynamic memory problems with affordable cost.