Memory profiling tool for Delphi?

Question

I set up a project and ran it, and looked at it in Process Explorer, and it turns out it's using about 5x more RAM than I would have guessed, just to start up. Now if my program's going too slowly, I hook it up to a profiler and have it tell me what's using all my cycles. Is there any similar tool I can hook it up to and have it tell me what's using all my RAM?

Answer 1

AQTime can help with that too.

Answer 2

AQTime has been for us an amazing profiling tool. It works amazingly well and allowed us to pinpoint bottlenecks in places where never thought were any, while sometimes showing us there was no bottleneck where we were sure there was.

It is, along with Finalbuilder, Araxis Merge, and TestComplete, an indispensable tool!

Answer 3

What figures are you using from Process Explorer?

"Memory Use" in Windows is not a straightforward topic. Almost every application incorporates some form of memory manager that attempts to satisfy the memory needs of the application, about which the operating system has surprisingly little knowledge - the OS knows what memory the applications memory manager is using, but that is not always the same thing as what your application is actually using.

A simple way to see this is to watch the memory use reported by Task Manager.... start up a Delphi application, note it's "memory use" in Task Manager. Then minimise that application to the taskbar and you should see the memory use fall. Even restoring the application again won't result in the memory use climbing back to the previous level.

In crude terms, when you minimise the application the memory manager takes that as a cue that it should return any unnecessarily "used" memory back to the OS. That is, memory that the memory manager is using to efficiently service your application but which your application itself is not actually using.

The memory manager should also return this memory to the system if the system requires it, due to low memory conditions for example. The minimise to taskbar "trick" is simply a sensible optimisation - since a minimised app is typically not actively in use it's an opportune time to do such "housekeeping" automatically.

(This is not "a bad thing", it's just something to be aware of when considering "memory use")

To make matters worse, in addition to memory that the memory manager is using but which your application is not, there is also the question of "commit charge", which won't necessarily show up as memory that is used by either your application OR it's memory manager!

In a Delphi application (from Delphi 2006 onward) the memory manager is FastMM and that has a built in tool that will show you what your application memory use is like from "the inside" (or at least it used to have such a tool - I've not used it in a while).

iirc using it was a question of simply adding a unit to your project and creating a form at runtime (via some "debug only" menu item on the Help menu, or whatever mechanism you choose) that would then give you a "map" of your memory usage.

If you are using a version of Delphi earlier than 2006 you can still use FastMM - it's free and open source. Just download it from sourceforge.

Answer 4

In addition to the others: Before I switched to D2006+ (and started using fastmm) I used AQTime's free memproof. It has some issues but it is workable.