valgrind — Development Environment and Programming

It is a memory debugging tool that checks running programs for memory leaks and invalid memory access.

Basic Information

What is this program?

valgrind is a tool that runs programs on a virtual machine and exhaustively checks memory allocation, deallocation, and access. Using the Memcheck tool, you can catch problems such as memory leaks, out-of-bounds access, and use of uninitialized values while the program is running.

It is used to track problems where server programs run for a long time and memory keeps growing, or issues that crash only in certain environments. In exchange for running tens of times slower, it can find dynamic memory errors that are difficult to catch with static analysis.

What problems does it solve?

• When a service runs for a long time and memory keeps increasing steadily (leak tracing).
• When finding the cause of difficult-to-reproduce segmentation faults or unexpected termination.
• When checking the memory safety of newly written C/C++ modules before deployment.
• When checking excessive memory access suspected as a cause of cache invalidation or performance degradation.

Main features

Memcheck (memory check)

Tracks allocation, deallocation, reads, and writes to report leaks and invalid accesses.

• Use case: Run a test scenario once under valgrind.
• Result: Get the error location (file, line, and call stack).
• Limitations: Execution slows down significantly, and multithreaded programs incur heavy overhead.

Leak report

Reports unreleased memory at program exit and the point where it was allocated.

• Use case: Check whether nightly batch jobs leak.
• Result: Get a list of suspected leak locations and size information.
• Limitations: Legitimate global caches may be over-reported as 'true leaks'.

Cachegrind·Callgrind

Profiles CPU cache usage and function call costs.

• Use case: Find performance bottleneck functions.
• Result: Get estimated instruction counts and cache misses per function.
• Limitations: Differs from actual measured timing, so use it as a reference.

Helgrind·DRD

Checks multithreaded programs for race conditions and deadlocks.

• Use case: Get clues about the cause when reproducing thread errors.
• Result: Reports shared resource accesses suspected of races.
• Limitations: There are false positives, so interpreting results requires experience.

Installation and execution

Ubuntu / Debian

Install from the distribution repository.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install valgrind

RHEL / CentOS / Fedora

Install from the default repositories.

sudo dnf install valgrind

Check version

Check the installed version.

valgrind --version

Real-world usage examples

Running with Memcheck

Run the program under Memcheck.

valgrind --leak-check=full ./app-server --once

Summary report

When you only want the leak summary, restrict leak-check to summary.

valgrind --leak-check=summary ./batch-job

Call profiling (example)

Use Callgrind to extract per-function costs. The output is an example.

valgrind --tool=callgrind ./app-server --once

Advantages and limitations

Advantages

• It can check memory errors using only the binary without changing source code.
• It reports error locations in detail, including the call stack.
• It is included in most Linux distribution repositories, making installation easy.
• Along with Memcheck, it also provides profiling and thread checking tools.

Points to consider before use

• Execution slows down significantly, making it difficult to use as-is for large-scale tests.
• Multithreaded large-scale services have load and false-positive issues, so partial application is necessary.
• Support for macOS and some architectures is limited.
• Global cache-style allocations may be over-reported as leaks, requiring result interpretation.

Comparison with similar programs

Official resources and further learning

• Official website — https://valgrind.org/
• Official documentation / knowledge base — https://valgrind.org/docs/manual/
• Official downloads — https://valgrind.org/downloads/current.html
• Release notes — https://valgrind.org/info/news.html
• Source / development resources — https://sourceware.org/git/valgrind.git

Version and supported environment information was verified on the official website as of 2026-10-18. Installation commands may vary depending on the distribution and version you use, so be sure to check the official installation documentation as well.

Real execution screen

This is a synthetic example that reconstructs a valgrind Memcheck leak summary report screen in a server style. The screen is a synthetic example and is not an actual execution result.

!valgrind --leak-check=full result: a terminal displaying HEAP SUMMARY and LEAK SUMMARY (definitely lost, etc.)

An actual production server

Source (HTML): https://games.aidebatehub.com/programs/apps/dev/valgrind.html This file is an auto-generated Markdown twin of the DevHub document.