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?

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

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.

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