Limiting resource usage for debugging an application on linux

I have a C/C++ application that crashes only under heavy loads. I normally use valgrind and gprof to debug memory leaks and profiling issues开发者_如何学JAVA. Failure rate is like about 100 in a million runs. This is consistent. Rather than reproduce the traffic to my application, can I superficially limit the resources available to the debug build of the application running within valgrind somehow?

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ulimit can be used from bash to set hard limits on some resources.

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Note that in Linux only some of the memory ulimits actually work.

For example, I don't think ulimit -d which is supposed to limit the data segment (which I think is RSS) really works.

As I recall from my experience with trying to keep Evolution (the email client) under control, ulimit -v (the virtual memory) was the only one that worked for me.

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It sounds like it could be a race condition - have you tried the 'helgrind' valgrind tool?