Memory Leak Detection Tools: A Comparative Analysis

Memory leak is a situation when the memory taken up by dynamically allocated objects is not deallocated after its use. Memory leak is a serious problem in embedded systems as they are memory constrained devices. This can also be a serious problem in servers as continuous leaking of memory space results in denial of client requests in due time. The programmer has to take care while writing the code of the application for such main memory related issues. Apart from manual inspection of the code for memory leak, finding illegal memory issues can be tedious sometimes. Various tools are available in order to detect main memory related issues in the software which can ease the testing time of application. These tools are categorized as static and dynamic analysis tools. These tools help programmers to write memory safe and clean code without going into memory leak and related issues. This paper discusses different memory leakage detection tools. The paper also provides the comparison of different tools on the basis of different parameters and concludes with the evaluation of the memory detection tools on the basis of time taken. The results show that Mtrace tool takes maximum time for analysis and Electric fence tools takes minimum time for analysis.