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

It sounds like your program is suffering from memory corruption. As already said your best option on Linux is probably valgrind. But here are two other options:

• First of all use a debug malloc. Nearly all C libraries offer a debug malloc implementation that initialize memory (normal malloc keeps "old" contents in memory), check the boundaries of an allocated block for corruption and so on. And if that's not enough there is a wide choice of 3rd party implementations.

• You might want to have a look at VMWare Workstation. I have not set it up that way, but from their marketing materials they support a rather interesting way of debugging: Run the debugee in a "recording" virtual machine. When memory corruption occurs set a memory breakpoint at the corrupted address an then turn back time in the VM to exactly that moment when that piece of memory was overwritten. See this PDF on how to setup replay debugging with Linux/gdb. I believe there is a 15 or 30 days demo for Workstation 7, that might be enough to shake out those bugs from your code.