NAME

       memleak  -  Print a summary of outstanding allocations and their call stacks to detect memory leaks. Uses
       Linux eBPF/bcc.

SYNOPSIS

       memleak [-h] [-p PID] [-t]  [-a]  [-o  OLDER]  [-c  COMMAND]  [--combined-only]  [--wa-missing-free]  [-s
       SAMPLE_RATE] [-T TOP] [-z MIN_SIZE] [-Z MAX_SIZE] [-O OBJ] [INTERVAL] [COUNT]

DESCRIPTION

       memleak traces and matches memory allocation and deallocation requests, and collects call stacks for each
       allocation.  memleak  can  then  print  a summary of which call stacks performed allocations that weren't
       subsequently freed.

       When tracing a  specific  process,  memleak  instruments  a  list  of  allocation  functions  from  libc,
       specifically:  malloc,  calloc,  realloc,  posix_memalign,  valloc, memalign, pvalloc, aligned_alloc, and
       free.  When tracing all processes, memleak instruments  kmalloc/kfree,  kmem_cache_alloc/kmem_cache_free,
       and also page allocations made by get_free_pages/free_pages.

       memleak may introduce significant overhead when tracing processes that allocate and free many blocks very
       quickly. See the OVERHEAD section below.

       This  tool  only works on Linux 4.6+. Stack traces are obtained using the new BPF_STACK_TRACE` APIs.  For
       kernels older than 4.6, see the version under  tools/old.   Kernel  memory  allocations  are  intercepted
       through tracepoints, which are available on Linux 4.7+.

REQUIREMENTS

       CONFIG_BPF and bcc.

OPTIONS

       -h     Print usage message.

       -p PID Trace this process ID only (filtered in-kernel). This traces libc allocator.

       -t     Print a trace of all allocation and free requests and results.

       -a     Print a list of allocations that weren't freed (and their sizes) in addition to their call stacks.

       -o OLDER
              Print  only  allocations  older  than  OLDER  milliseconds. Useful to remove false positives.  The
              default value is 500 milliseconds.

       -c COMMAND
              Run the specified command and trace its allocations only. This traces libc allocator.

       --combined-only
              Use  statistics  precalculated  in  kernel  space.  Amount  of  data  to  be  pulled  from  kernel
              significantly  decreases,  at  the  cost  of  losing  capabilities  of  time-based false positives
              filtering (-o).

       --wa-missing-free
              Make up the action of free to alleviate misjudgments when free is missing.

       -s SAMPLE_RATE
              Record roughly every SAMPLE_RATE-th allocation to reduce overhead.

       -t TOP Print only the top TOP stacks (sorted by size).  The default value is 10.

       -z MIN_SIZE
              Capture only allocations that are larger than or equal to MIN_SIZE bytes.

       -Z MAX_SIZE
              Capture only allocations that are smaller than or equal to MAX_SIZE bytes.

       -O OBJ Attach to allocation functions in specified object instead of resolving libc. Ignored when  kernel
              allocations are profiled.

       INTERVAL
              Print  a  summary  of  outstanding  allocations and their call stacks every INTERVAL seconds.  The
              default interval is 5 seconds.

       COUNT  Print the outstanding allocations summary COUNT times and then exit.

EXAMPLES

       Print outstanding kernel allocation stacks every 3 seconds:
              # memleak 3

       Print user outstanding allocation stacks and allocation details for the process 1005:
              # memleak -p 1005 -a

       Sample roughly every 5th allocation (~20%) of the call stacks and print the top 5
              stacks 10 times before quitting.  # memleak -s 5 --top=5 10

       Run ./allocs and print outstanding allocation stacks for that process:
              # memleak -c ./allocs

       Capture only allocations between 16 and 32 bytes in size:
              # memleak -z 16 -Z 32

OVERHEAD

       memleak can have significant overhead if the target process or kernel performs allocations at a very high
       rate. Pathological cases may exhibit up to 100x degradation in running time. Most of the  time,  however,
       memleak  shouldn't cause a significant slowdown. You can use the -s switch to reduce the overhead further
       by capturing only every N-th allocation. The -z and -Z switches can also  reduce  overhead  by  capturing
       only allocations of specific sizes.

       Additionally,  option  --combined-only  saves  processing  time  by reusing already calculated allocation
       statistics from kernel. It's faster, but lacks information about particular allocations.

       Also, option --wa-missing-free makes memleak more accuracy in the complicated environment.

       To determine the rate at which your application is calling malloc/free, or the rate at which your  kernel
       is  calling  kmalloc/kfree, place a probe with perf and collect statistics. For example, to determine how
       many calls to __kmalloc are placed in a typical period of 10 seconds:

       # perf probe '__kmalloc'

       # perf stat -a -e 'probe:__kmalloc' -- sleep 10

SOURCE

       This is from bcc.

              https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

       Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing  example  usage,  output,
       and commentary for this tool.

OS

       Linux

STABILITY

       Unstable - in development.

AUTHOR

       Sasha Goldshtein

USER COMMANDS                                      2016-01-14                                         memleak(8)