[Rd] question about --with-valgrind-instrumentation=level

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, Charles Geyer wrote:

> Does --with-valgrind-instrumentation=2 slow down R when valgrind or gctorture
> are not in use?  I am thinking of compiling the R that the whole department
> uses for research and teachin with --with-valgrind-instrumentation=2.  Is
> that a good idea or a bad idea?

It is a slightly bad idea: it does add extra code in memory.c that 
would always be called.

This only affects R.bin (or libR.so if you use the already slower 
shared-library version), so you can so as I do and simply use a 
different version of R.bin.

There is a similar issue with memory profiling.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595