Profiler and Memory Analysis Tools for Delphi
I recently upgraded from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2009. With Delphi 4 I had been using GpProfile by Primoz Gabrijelcic as a profiler and Memory Sleuth by Turbo Power for memory analysis and leak debugging. Both worked well for me. But I now need new tools that will work with Delphi 2009.
The leader in Profiling/Analysis tools for Delphi by a wide margin is obviously AQTime by AutomatedQA. They recently even gobbled up Memproof by Atanas Soyanov, which I understood was an excellent and free memory analysis tool, and incorporated its functionality into AQTime. But AQTime is very expensive for an individual programmer. It actually costs more than the upgrade to Delphi 2009 cost!
So my question is: Are there other less expensive options to do profiling and memory analysis in current versions of Delphi that you are happy with and recommend, or should I bite the bullet and pay the big bucks for AQTime?
Addenum: It seems the early answerers are indicating that the FastMM manager already included in Delphi is very good for finding memory leaks.
So then, are there any good alternatives for source code profiling?
One I'm curious about is ProDelphi by Michael Adolph which is less than one sixth the cost of AQTime. Do you use it? Is AQTime worth paying six times as much?
Addenum 2: I downloaded trial versions of both AQTime and ProDelphi.
AQTime was a bit overwhelming and a little confusing at first. It took a few hours to find some of the tricks needed to hook it up.
ProDelphi was very much like the GpProfile that I was used to. But its windows are cluttered and confusing and it's not quite as nice as GpProfile.
To me the big differences seem to be:
ProDelphi changes your code. AQTime does not. Changing code may corrupt your data if something goes wrong, but my experience with GpProfile was that it never happened to me. Plus one for AQTime.
ProDelphi requires you turn optimization off. But what you want to profile is your program with optimization on, the way it will be run. Plus one for AQTime.
ProDelphi only can profile down to the function or procedure. AQTime can go down to individual lines. Plus 2 for AQTime.
ProDelphi has a free version that will profile 20 routines, and its pro version costs less than $100 USD. AQTime is $600 USD. Plus 4 for ProDelphi.
The score is now 4-4. What do you think?
Addenum 3: Primoz Gabrijelcic is planning to get GpProfile working again. See his comments on some of the responses below. He on StackOverflow as Gabr.
Addenum 4: It seems like there may be a profiler solution after all. See Andre's open source asmprofiler, described below.
Answer
For the price, you cannot beat FastMM4 as a memory tracker. It's simple to use yet powerful and well integrated with Delphi.
I guess that you know that, without downloading, installing or changing anything else, just putting this line
ReportMemoryLeaksOnShutDown := True;
anywhere in your code, will enable basic reporting of memory leaks.
If you need more like crash information, EurekaLog is a very good product that we use. MadExcept also has a good reputation...
For profiling specifically, we have AQTime.
As for gpProfile, you can try and bug gabr on SO for an update... or go and update gpProfile yourself as it is open source. ;-)