Growth Tracker is a tool designed to identify unbounded heap growth in C++ software not caused by traditional memory leaks. This is a significant problem in software development that can lead to degraded performance and eventual program failure when available memory runs out. C++ memory analysis tools such as Valgrind, Purify and Insure++ currently do not detect the category of unwanted heap growth that Growth Tracker targets. Growth Tracker has identified memory issues in Google Chrome, WebKit, and Ogre3D. The maintainers of Chrome and Ogre3D have integrated the fixes I’ve submitted to problematic data structures that Growth Tracker identified.

A paper detailing this work was published in the Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification.

Growth Tracker was designed and developed by myself and Daniel Tracy under the direction of Sheldon Brown.