Ideally, one's code would work properly the first time around, and contain no hidden bugs that are waiting to crash the application, corrupt data, or cause other issues. Realistically, this is, of course, impossible. Thus it is that tools were developed which make it easy to examine and debug multithreaded applications.
In this chapter, we will look at a number of them including a regular debugger as well as some of the tools which are part of the Valgrind suite, specifically, Helgrind and DRD. We will also look at profiling a multithreaded application in order to find hotspots and potential issues in its design.
Topics covered in this chapter include the following:
- Introducing the Valgrind suite of tools
- Using the Helgrind and DRD tools
- Interpreting the Helgrind and DRD analysis results
- Profiling an application, and analyzing the results
