README

mmalloc - Dynamic memory checker. 

mmalloc features

    Buffer overrun and underrun detection
    Leak detection
    Detects use of freed blocks
    Backtrace of the allocation path, error path and freed path (where appropriate)
    Checkpoints to sieve the problem in your own code
    Some statistics
    High configurability allows finetuning of checking overhead, for development/production scenarios
    Fast: with all features disabled, close to or surpasses malloc in glibc
    Prevents fragmentation

mmalloc drawbacks

    Space overhead is double on average


Why another malloc debugger?

There are tons of dynamic memory checkers out there.
mmalloc was born to fill a gap when other freely
avaible checkers failed:

mmalloc was originally developed to find errors in
MUD game driver (ldmud). This driver was running
mud (bat.org) where the memory footprint of running
game would exceed 1.2Gbytes. This was where all 
other freely available (at that time) memory check
tools failed. Either they refused to allocate so much
or just were plain too slow to runn the actual game
(with users!) and thus trigger the problem i was
trying to track.

The performance of the game had to remain decent so that
users would play the game even when memory checker was
active. The design goal of mmalloc was to let developer
control the cpu-memory overhead versus checking 
details/coverage. Developer has great deal of control
about tuning the checking process (see mconfig.h).
You can use mmalloc whole development cycle and tune it
so that performance degration is acceptable.

It has been useful for me so I release it hoping
it would be useful for you too.

If mmalloc helps you find a problem or if
it fails to find one, I would still like
to hear your experiences about it.

-- Mika < miku (at) iki.fi >