Solving random crashes

Question

I am getting random crashes on my C++ application, it may not crash for a month, and then crash 10 times in a hour, and sometimes it may crash on launch, while sometimes it may

Answer 1

Try Valgrind (it's free, open-source):

The Valgrind distribution currently includes six production-quality tools: a memory error detector, two thread error detectors, a cache and branch-prediction profiler, a call-graph generating cache profiler, and a heap profiler. It also includes two experimental tools: a heap/stack/global array overrun detector, and a SimPoint basic block vector generator. It runs on the following platforms: X86/Linux, AMD64/Linux, PPC32/Linux, PPC64/Linux, and X86/Darwin (Mac OS X).

Valgrind Frequently Asked Questions

The Memcheck part of the package is probably the place to start:

Memcheck is a memory error detector. It can detect the following problems that are common in C and C++ programs.

• Accessing memory you shouldn't, e.g. overrunning and underrunning heap blocks, overrunning the top of the stack, and accessing memory after it has been freed.

• Using undefined values, i.e. values that have not been initialised, or that have been derived from other undefined values.

• Incorrect freeing of heap memory, such as double-freeing heap blocks, or mismatched use of malloc/new/new[] versus free/delete/delete[]

• Overlapping src and dst pointers in memcpy and related functions.

• Memory leaks.