Question

I’m using XCode to develop a C command line utility and I’m attempting to using XCode’s profiling capabilities to track program allocations and possibly memory leaks. I can attach an allocation tracker utility just fine to the program itself and it works, the problem is I cannot interact with the program from this point and it’s just stuck in its initialized and waiting state (the program is definitely running in the background somewhere I just cannot get to it). I’ve tried tweaking various settings to no avail, any ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

If you launch Instruments outside of Xcode, you should be able to use the pull-down list above ‘Target’ and ‘Attach to Process’ to profile any already-running program. So one option — given that the way you describe your program makes it sound interactive — is to launch your utility in a terminal then to attach Instruments to it.

E.g. vi isn’t symbolicated but running Instruments against it has just revealed that when in insert mode, it spends about 14% of its time in write and 4.5% in strcmp (albeit that with something like vi the processing is so minuscule that there’s bound to be sampling error in there).