I recently found out about Valgrind. I've never used similar tools, but if it is as useful as some say, I'm all for learning about it. I'm starting to research it, but I thought I would ask about personal experiences here. Anyone have experience with this suite? Comments? Alternatives I should know about?

definitively best tool for debugging memory access. It has only one major drawback - it's very very slow (few dozens times when compared to regular run). But still worth a try (especially when debugging leaks or buffer overflows). And it call used for debugging racial conditions, cache profiling and other userfull stuff too

Yep, Valgrind is definitely very useful. Depending on the driver, it may have pretty bad interaction with OpenGL drivers though, so it's advisable to use some care in that area. In general, it's useful if you can ssh in from another machine (note that this is generally true for debugging OpenGL programs).

cu,
Prefect

Valgrind has helped me to find some solve lots of memleaks, so I definitely think you should learn it. It can be a bit hard to understand sometimes, but it's well worth it when you've learnt how it works.

Quote: Original post by harry_x
definitively best tool for debugging memory access. It has only one major drawback - it's very very slow (few dozens times when compared to regular run). But still worth a try (especially when debugging leaks or buffer overflows). And it call used for debugging racial conditions, cache profiling and other userfull stuff too

Yup, gotta hate those racial conditions [wink]