Rational Purify failng to jump to memory leaks.

Question

So my company uses a delightfully buggy program called Rational Purify (as a plugin to Microsoft Visual Developer Studio) to manage memory leaks. The program is deigned to let you click on a memory leak after you have encountered it, and then jump to the line that the leak occurs on.

Unfortunately Purify is malfunctioning and Purify will not jump to the place that the leak occurred it only mentions the class and method that the leak occurs in. Unfortunately, sometimes this is about as useful as hiring a guide to help you hunt bears and having him point to the forest and tell you there are bears there.

Does anyone with Purify experience have any idea how I might fix this problem or have a good manual to look though?

Answer 1

Are you sure you have debug build? Or rather you have all PDB's enabled? Try WindDbg on your executable and check with !lmi command what is visible.

Is whole code properly instrumented?

Also consider using something else like free Visual Leak Detector or Microsoft's tool LeakDiag.

Answer 2

I used Purify about 5 years ago. It was really flaky then. They kept promising to fix all the bugs in the 'next release'. We gave up on it in the end. One can only wonder if they used their own QA tools on their products. Oh the irony...

Answer 3

Generally you have two options, one exclude modules DLL's from instrumentation in Purify, it helps some times. Second is get BoundsChecker, this does compile time instrumentation much slower but the level of detail is an order of magnitude better.

We generally use Purify on check-in, sanity checking, and BoundsChecker when we know a bug/crash exists.

BoundsChecker has some nice features like only instrument files A.cpp & B.cpp, excluding all the rest.

Be aware neither of these two applications function on 64 bit operating systems, and BoundsChecker will not install on 64 bit OS. Most frustrating if you make the switch to native 64 bit development with 32 bit back port!

Answer 4

Purify is like a swiss knife. If you know how to use it, you will get some results, not the best but still results. If you don't, it will crash, because it is just another program running on Windows.

In the end you will need a lot of patience, rebuilds and a bit of luck.

Answer 5

Purify comes with a script called ScanVSSolutionForPurifyPlus.pl which will ensure that your project files have all the right settings for Purify to work properly. If you haven't run it, give it a go.

(I've personally used ScanVSSolutionForPurifyPlus.pl on a large solution, and it worked like a charm. One caveat: when you give it the name of your .sln file, you might need to give it the full pathname.)