Using Address Sanitizer with TrafficServer

• November 4, 2016
• trafficserver  
• debugging  

Verifying Traffic Server with AddressSanitizer is fairly straight-forward. On Linux, you need recent gcc or clang and the libasan library. On OS X, libasan wasn’t present, so I just switched to Linux ;)

You should give --enable-asan to configure when you build. The build system will enable ASAN on all the parts that should have it. Then, whenever you run you will get ASAN checking memory state.

LeakSanitizer reports leaks from an atexit(3) handler, so you need to ensure that the program exits rather than calls _exit(2) or dumps core. If you are using traffic_manager, then you can set the PROXY_AUTO_EXIT variable to have traffic_server voluntarily exit after the specified number of seconds. LeakSanitizer will kindly print a leak report each time it exits, and traffic_manager will start it up for you to test again.