Re: [Valgrind-users] minimise massif overhead

[Tim P. <ec...@ec...>]

On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 10:41 +0100, maxime louvel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to monitor the heap utilisation of a multimedia player
> (the ffmpeg player, ffplay).
> I've done :
> valgrind --tool=massif --depth=5 --time-unit=ms
> --massif-out-file=myfile ffplay HP6_480.mov
> 
> However when I execute this I got a lot of overhead and the stream
> isn't nicely played. The problem is that decoders have real-time
> constraints and thus monitoring an overwhelmed application may lead to
> false information.
> 
> Is it possible to lower this overhead, I'm just interested in logging
> the heap usage : I do not need any memory check.

I would probably try a replacement malloc() that offers logging via
LD_PRELOAD before using something like valgrind for this. 

Even the garbage collecting variety would give you a good report of heap
usage.

Its the only way I can think of to accomplish it without seriously
slowing down the decoding. Even the replacement malloc() might result in
a noticeable slow down.

HTH

Cheers,
--Tim