Until recently, the documentation for all of Mozilla’s memory profiling and leak detection tools had some major problems.
- It was scattered across MDN, the Mozilla Wiki, and the Mozilla archive site (yes, really).
- Documentation for several tools was spread across multiple pages.
- Documentation for some tools was meagre, non-existent, or overly verbose.
- Some of the documentation was out of date, e.g. describing tools that no longer exist.
A little while back I fixed these problems.
- The documentation for these tools is now all on MDN. If you look at the MDN Performance page in the “Memory profiling and leak detection tools” section, you’ll see a brief description of each tool that explains the circumstances in which it is useful, and a link to the relevant documentation.
- The full list of documented tools includes: about:memory, DMD, areweslimyet.com, BloatView, Refcount tracing and balancing, GC and CC logs, Valgrind, LeakSanitizer, Apple tools, TraceMalloc, Leak Gauge, and LogAlloc.
- As well as consolidating all the pages in one place, I also improved some of the pages (with the help of people like Andrew McCreight). In particular, about:memory now has reasonably detailed documentation, something it has lacked until now.
Please take a look, and if you see any problems let me know. Or, if you’re feeling confident just fix things yourself! Thanks.