Typically, virtual memory occupied by a process can be separated into the following categories:
For information about obtaining process memory distribution details, see Inspecting your process memory distribution.
The main system allocator has been instrumented to keep track of statistics associated with allocating and freeing memory. This lets the memory statistics module unobtrusively inspect any process's memory usage.
When you launch your program with the Memory Analysis tool, your program uses the debug version of the malloc library (librcheck.so). Besides the normal statistics, this library also tracks the history of every allocation and deallocation, and provides cover functions for the string and memory functions (e.g. strcmp, memcpy, memmove). Each cover function validates the corresponding function's arguments before using them. For example, if you allocate 16 bytes, then forget the terminating NULL character and attempt to copy a 16-byte string into the block using the strcpy function, the library detects the error.
The debug version of the malloc library uses more memory than the nondebug version. When tracing all calls to malloc, the library requires additional CPU overhead to process and store the memory-trace events.
The QNX Memory Analysis perspective can help you pinpoint and solve various kinds of problems, including: