Mopping Up Mozilla Memory Leaks

mouseman writes "Geodesic Systems, a maker of memory management/debugging software, has a live demo of their Linux product running on the Mozilla nightly builds. It's pretty damn slick -- it detects memory leaks and can show where in the code the leaked memory was allocated and actually recover (GC) the leaked memory. The Mozilla reports actually look pretty good, which jibes with my own impressions of how much it has improved -- see for yourself."

Comments

Interesting

[martial]

I must confess that since Purify is not available for Linux, we are always looking for interesting pieces of software to do this job.

Now the only question I have are :
1) can it be used as a debugger too ?
2) how does it compare to other systems like electricfence ?

YES!!

[JoeLinux]

Ever since .9.7, Mozilla has been running so damn fast and stable that it replaced my old Browser (Nutscrape). I'm not surprised at all. IT renders pages faster than IE does. I'm quite happy with it.

JoeLinux

Other Platforms

[wazzzup]

Will this directly affect and improve Mozilla on non-Linux platforms? Would it have a use flagging the leaks in the Linux code and then making the code corrections on the OS X platform?

Debugger integration?

[Malc]

Does this product actually integrate with the debugger. For example, can it break on a line of code before it uses a dangling pointer?

I've been using NuMega products within MSVC for a number of years. I used Purify before that. I haven't used the latest version from NuMega, but I've always had a lot of success with BoundsChecker (memory profiler, error detection, etc), True Time (performance profiler) and True Coverage (code usage profiler).

I wouldn't even know where to start looking for open source equivalents of these products. Can anybody give me any pointers? Preferably for Windows, but also Linux. How does this product compare with the likes of those from NuMega and Rational?

Is there some other Mozilla out there

[Aexia]

that I seem to be missing?

After reading the Salon article about how improved and fast it was now, I decided to give it a whirl on my NT desktop at work.

I uninstalled it after about 15 minutes. It was just slow. Sluggish in loading pages, slow in creating new windows, everything. Not only was it slower than IE 5.5 but what surprised me was that it was slower than *Netscape* 4.7, which is what I primarily use. It's a shame because it had some nice options.

What am I missing? Is it not meant to run on NT? Is it debugging code? Would it run better on XP? I'd love to give it a chance but apparently, I got some other Mozilla browser instead of the one everyone here is raving about.

Re:Is there some other Mozilla out there

[Aexia]

Be aware that while Mozilla is physically slower and more memory hungry, it's still a lighter browser over all. It takes around 66% of the download space of a recent MSIE, despite also having email and IRC and whatever, and even manages to be smaller than Netscape.

It may be slower and consume more resources but at least it uses less disk space?

That's really not an argument the open source community should be making.

What I'd really like...

[mateub]

...is a cross-platform tool. We are working on a project (in C++) at work that runs on HP-UX, Linux and Windows-under-Cygwin (a little English town near Stratford-on-Avonshire). What I really want is ONE tool that I can use on ALL these platforms. We use ElectricFence on HP-UX and Linux, but no luck under Cygwin so far. Purify doesn't work under Cygwin either, only MS. First tool to support all three of these gets our vote and even our money.

adéu,
Mateu