M-Cork - Memory Leak Debugging Tool

I'll try to update this page later, but for now, see the Sourceforge M-Cork Project Page instead. This page should redirect you there after ~15 seconds.

This project is intended as a drop in replacement for the standard malloc library, primarily for finding and "corking" memory leaks.

This project was created in 1999 after I found that dmalloc's allocation history was insufficient for my needs. M-Cork is intended primarily to address memory leaks, although it has a memory scanning feature that can be used to detect memory buffer overflow and underflow problems after they occur.

It represents two advantages over dmalloc -- and these were the motivating factors for the creation of M-Cork:

It allows the programmer to optionally designate a timepoint (in most cases the start of the program's main processing loop). The final summary report of unreleased memory blocks will classify blocks allocated before that time point differently than ones allocated after that point ("stray" vs. "lost") ¹.
It prints a much deeper stack location for allocations and deallocations. This depth is controlled by a single compile-time macro definition; by default it is 5 but it can be increased to 12 without a code change².

However, it is not as old, nor necessarily as code-mature as dmalloc. It's handy, easy to use, and works very well for the class of problems for which it is intended.

Regards,
MarvinT

Footnotes:

1	Thus, the program/programmer need not release every block of memory that the daemon allocated at start up; in my case that was in the hundreds of allocations. Admittedly this is a bit sloppy, but the timeline was very, very tight and not all allocations were in code to which I had access. Your experiences may be the same!
2	If you have utility classes or functions that do the actual allocation, M-Cork will show the location of the code that called the utility class, allowing meaningful debugging. This is controlled by the value of NSF ( Number of Stack Frames), you can either add "NSF=8" (for example) onto the configure command line, or set the environment variable NSF before running configure .