Overriding Malloc?

[Josh]

I want to do some memory testing, but every approach I read about doesn't work.

• Application verifier uses an enormous amount of memory and makes testing impossible.
  
• Including afx.h doesn't work because I've got tons of libraries I use that include windows.h.
  
• I can't figure out how to override malloc / free because I just get a ton of errors.
  

 

Is there another way to do this?

[Josh]

I have been able to improve memory testing with this code:

#ifdef DEBUG
_CrtSetDbgFlag(_CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF|
_CRTDBG_ALLOC_MEM_DF |
_CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF);
_CrtSetReportMode(_CRT_ERROR,
_CRTDBG_MODE_WNDW);
_CrtSetReportMode(_CRT_ASSERT,
_CRTDBG_MODE_WNDW);
#endif

 

Very very slow but it seems to catch memory overwrites I intentionally added for testing.

[randomkeyhits]

If you want to try this kind of thing under Linux then I recommend Valgrind. Its my go to tool for memory integrity testing.

[nelsoncs]

Yes, unfortunately Valgrind is only available for Linux and Unices. It is a fantastic tool and super easy to use. I often make it my first line of debugging info for C++ because so many bugs also cause memory leaks.

 

Probably the only real drawbacks are the slow runtime (unavoidable) and large amount of debug output.