ElectricFence is great, and I recall having a similar feeling to the OP when I first used it because many of the described issues were also new to me at the tim

ElectricFence is great, and I recall having a similar feeling to the OP when I first used it because many of the described issues were also new to me at the time. It's a great experience :) If you're on Solaris or a Solaris-derived OS, you also have the libumem and watchmalloc libraries that can help you out. I have used libumem to great effect in the past. It's been a while, but I anecdotally recall that Solaris is more stingy with its mallocs than Linux. I used to compile and run my C projects on Solaris as a first pass in my search for memory errors.