Chapter 4. TAU Memory Profiling Tutorial

4.1. TAU's memory API options

TAU can evaluate the following memory events:

  1. Memory utilization options that examine how much heap memory is currently used, and

  2. Memory headroom evaluation options that examine how much a program can grow (or how much headroom it has) before it runs out of free memory on the heap. During memory headroom evaluation TAU tries to call malloc with chunks that progressively increase in size, until all memory is exhausted. Then it frees those chunks, keeping track of how much memory it successfully allocated.

  3. Memory leaks in C/C++ programs TAU will track malloc through the execuation issuing user event when the program fails to the allocated memory.