.TH memleak 8  "2016-01-14" "USER COMMANDS"
.SH NAME
memleak \- Print a summary of outstanding allocations and their call stacks to detect memory leaks. Uses Linux eBPF/bcc.
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B 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]
.SH 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+.

.SH REQUIREMENTS
CONFIG_BPF and bcc.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
\-h
Print usage message.
.TP
\-p PID
Trace this process ID only (filtered in-kernel). This traces libc allocator.
.TP
\-t
Print a trace of all allocation and free requests and results.
.TP
\-a
Print a list of allocations that weren't freed (and their sizes) in addition to their call stacks.
.TP
\-o OLDER
Print only allocations older than OLDER milliseconds. Useful to remove false positives.
The default value is 500 milliseconds.
.TP
\-c COMMAND
Run the specified command and trace its allocations only. This traces libc allocator.
.TP
\-\-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).
.TP
\-\-wa-missing-free
Make up the action of free to alleviate misjudgments when free is missing.
.TP
\-s SAMPLE_RATE
Record roughly every SAMPLE_RATE-th allocation to reduce overhead.
.TP
\-t TOP
Print only the top TOP stacks (sorted by size).
The default value is 10.
.TP
\-z MIN_SIZE
Capture only allocations that are larger than or equal to MIN_SIZE bytes.
.TP
\-Z MAX_SIZE
Capture only allocations that are smaller than or equal to MAX_SIZE bytes.
.TP
\-O OBJ
Attach to allocation functions in specified object instead of resolving libc. Ignored when kernel allocations are profiled.
.TP
INTERVAL
Print a summary of outstanding allocations and their call stacks every INTERVAL seconds.
The default interval is 5 seconds.
.TP
COUNT
Print the outstanding allocations summary COUNT times and then exit.
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
Print outstanding kernel allocation stacks every 3 seconds:
#
.B memleak 3
.TP
Print user outstanding allocation stacks and allocation details for the process 1005:
#
.B memleak -p 1005 -a
.TP
Sample roughly every 5th allocation (~20%) of the call stacks and print the top 5
stacks 10 times before quitting.
#
.B memleak -s 5 --top=5 10
.TP
Run ./allocs and print outstanding allocation stacks for that process: 
#
.B memleak -c "./allocs"
.TP
Capture only allocations between 16 and 32 bytes in size:
#
.B memleak -z 16 -Z 32
.SH 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:

#
.B perf probe '__kmalloc'

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

.SH SOURCE
This is from bcc.
.IP
https://github.com/iovisor/bcc
.PP
Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing
example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.
.SH OS
Linux
.SH STABILITY
Unstable - in development.
.SH AUTHOR
Sasha Goldshtein