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Valgrind VS PerfView

Compare Valgrind VS PerfView and see what are their differences

Valgrind logo Valgrind

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools.

PerfView logo PerfView

CPU and memory performance-analysis tool
  • Valgrind Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-15
  • PerfView Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-11

Valgrind features and specs

  • Comprehensive Memory Debugging
    Valgrind provides thorough memory debugging and memory leak detection, identifying use-after-free and other memory errors in applications.
  • Profiling Capabilities
    In addition to identifying memory issues, Valgrind offers basic CPU profiling, allowing developers to assess performance bottlenecks.
  • No Source Code Changes Required
    Valgrind can be used without altering the source code, making it easy to integrate into existing projects for debugging purposes.
  • Supports Multiple Languages
    Valgrind supports a variety of programming languages, including C, C++, and others, making it versatile across different codebases.
  • Wide Platform Support
    It is available on many platforms, including Linux and macOS, providing flexibility to developers working in different environments.

Possible disadvantages of Valgrind

  • Performance Overhead
    Valgrind significantly slows down program execution, often by a factor of 10 to 30 times, which can make testing large applications more time-consuming.
  • Limited Windows Support
    Valgrind has no native Windows support, requiring developers to use alternate solutions or run it in a Linux environment.
  • Complexity with Multithreading
    Debugging multithreaded applications can be complex, and Valgrind's tools may struggle with race conditions and other threading issues.
  • Heavy Resource Usage
    Running applications under Valgrind can consume significant system resources, impacting other processes and the overall system performance.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    The tool has a steep learning curve, especially for users new to debugging tools, which can require additional time for proficiency.

PerfView features and specs

  • Comprehensive Performance Analysis
    PerfView offers extensive performance analysis capabilities, including CPU usage, memory allocation, and garbage collection, making it a powerful tool for diagnosing performance issues.
  • Low Overhead
    The tool is designed to have minimal impact on the performance of the application being monitored, allowing for accurate measurement without significant interference.
  • Command-line Capabilities
    PerfView supports command-line operations, enabling integration with automated performance testing and continuous integration pipelines.
  • Rich Visualization
    It provides a range of data visualization options to help users understand complex performance data in an intuitive way.
  • Free and Open Source
    As an open-source project, PerfView is free to use and benefit from community contributions and transparency in its development.

Possible disadvantages of PerfView

  • Steep Learning Curve
    PerfView has a complex interface and options that may require a significant amount of time for new users to learn and use effectively.
  • Windows Only
    The tool is designed specifically for Windows environments, limiting its applicability for cross-platform development.
  • Limited Real-time Analysis
    PerfView is not primarily focused on real-time performance monitoring, which might be a limitation for certain use cases requiring immediate feedback.
  • Complex Data
    The sheer volume and complexity of data that PerfView can produce may be overwhelming to users who are less experienced with performance profiling.
  • Outdated Documentation
    Some users may find the official documentation to be outdated or lacking in comprehensive examples and explanations, making self-learning harder.

Valgrind videos

Detecting Memory Leaks With Valgrind

More videos:

  • Review - Finding memory errors with Valgrind
  • Review - sparcv9 New architecture to be supported by Valgrind

PerfView videos

PerfView: The Ultimate .NET Performance Tool

More videos:

  • Review - Track Down Outlaw Memory Leaks with PerfView | Pluralsight
  • Review - PerfVIew - PC Performance Analysis - HDD/CPU/Memory

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Valgrind and PerfView)
Software Development
73 73%
27% 27
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
IDE
100 100%
0% 0
Resource Profiling And Monitoring

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Valgrind seems to be a lot more popular than PerfView. While we know about 42 links to Valgrind, we've tracked only 3 mentions of PerfView. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Valgrind mentions (42)

  • Linux from the developer's perspective. Part 4 - strace and pmap
    After programming and compilation, you get a binary program image, which you can also analyse. Analysis at both source code and binary image stages is called static analysis. We already did static analysis, when going over program segments with readelf. A popular static analysis tool is valgrind. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Why does Debian change software?
    Hello, as always: imho (!) I remember this incident - if my memory doesn't trick me: it was openssl which accessed memory it didn't allocated to collect randomness / entropy for key-generation. And valgrind complained about a possible memory-leak - its a profiling-tool with the focus on detecting memory-mgmt problems. * https://valgrind.org/ instead of taking a closer look / trying to understand what exactly went... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Understanding the Odin Programming Language
    Odin has a builtin heap allocator that works the same way you would expect any other high-level language to do memory allocationโ€“it's just that you have to free the memory yourself. Plus, Odin's built in `context` system makes it really easy to change what kind of allocator is used for different sections of code. For my use cases, I've never needed any more than a heap and an arena, detailed in this talk:... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger
    Dunno, who says a lot of effort was put into Rosetta 2? It's mostly something that was needed in the first few years so you could run Chrome and Photoshop, but those have been ported now. It's mostly useful for running WINE but that's not super common outside games. That said, a binary recompiler has a lot of uses once you have one: https://valgrind.org. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Top 10 Profiler Tools for Optimizing Software Performance in 2024
    Valgrind is an open-source profiling tool suite ideal for debugging and profiling C and C++ applications. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
View more

PerfView mentions (3)

  • Microsoft's perfview - Do you care about this tool?
    It is fascinating to see so many distributed nugets of software lying around for specific use cases. One of them is perfview by Microsoft (https://github.com/microsoft/perfview). Source: over 2 years ago
  • W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth
    Could you profile it with windows perfview[1]? [1] https://github.com/microsoft/perfview. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • Any recommendation on profiling tools for .Net Framework 4.7 application? On a legacy project (mvc, api) we are experiencing high CPU and I need to pinpoint root causes of this.
    Canโ€™t believe this hasnโ€™t been mentioned yet: https://github.com/microsoft/perfview. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Valgrind and PerfView, you can also consider the following products

VisualVM - VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling...

dotTrace Memory - With dotTrace Memory, you can quickly profile the memory usage of your applications based on .

WPMU DEV - WPMU offers WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress Plugins and Themes.

.NET Memory Profiler - .NET Memory Profiler. A powerful tool for finding memory leaks and optimizing the memory usage in programs written in C#, VB.NET or any other .NET Language.

MAMP - MAMP is the abbreviation for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It is a reliable application with its four components that allows you to access the local PHP server as well as the database server (SQL).

GlowCode - C++ and other programming languages profiler