Attach to a Running Program

Use this screen to attach to a running program. While the process of attaching to a process within MemoryScape is quite simple—just select the process and click a button—MemoryScape cannot obtain memory debugging information from that file unless you either:

Link in the Heap Interposition Agent (HIA) into the program before the program began executing. This is discussed in the “Debugging Memory Problems Using MemoryScape” book.


Platform	Variable
Apple Mac OS X	DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
IBM AIX	MALLOCTYPE
Linux	LD_PRELOAD
Sun	LD_PRELOAD
IBM Blue Gene/P and Blue Gene/Q	LD_PRELOAD

The best way to set this variable is by using the env command. For example, here’s how you would set this variable on a Linux system:

You can either type the name of the machine upon which your program will execute or select a previously named machine from the dropdown list. The machine entered within this area must have the same architecture as the machine upon which you are running MemoryScape, with the exception of those heterogeneous platforms described in Heterogeneous and Cross-Debugging on Linux, in the TotalView Platforms Guide. For example, if you are running MemoryScape on a linux-x86 machine, you cannot name a Sun Solaris system.

After selecting a host, MemoryScape displays all of the processes running on that host. You will then select the process to which MemoryScape will attach.

This chart shows how many steps are involved in attaching to a file and where you are in this process.

If too many processes are displayed, you can remove some from this list by using a filter that specifies a pattern for the files that MemoryScape will display. Type the filter using normal shell globbing rules; that is, you can use such characters as asterisks (*) and question marks (?) as wildcard characters. For example, you could type “fo*b?r”.

After entering a filter, click the Refresh button to apply the filter against the displayed list of processes.

Tells MemoryScape to open the currently selected process in TotalView. The TotalView process window will display the current state of that process. You must have a TotalView license available to debug in TotalView.

Be aware that opening the TotalView process window from within MemoryScape does not initialize TotalView in the same way as starting TotalView directly. The definitions in your .tvdrc file and your saved breakpoints are not loaded. However, you can load a breakpoint file using the Action Point menu item in the process window. If you need the definitions in your .tvdrc file, start TotalView first and open MemoryScape from within TotalView.