---
title: Patching valgrind to show wall-clock time
---

If you specify the `--time-stamp=yes` option to valgrind, it will prefix each line of the report with the elapsed time since the start of the program.  This gives a rough idea of when a particular error occurred (since memory errors are reported in "real time", as they happen).

In our case, we wanted to correlate memory errors with the log messages that our application produces, and the deltaT wasn't good enough to enable us to do that.  So we produced a patch that will output timestamps using wall-clock time, rather than deltaT.

The patch has been submitted upstream -- you can get it at: <https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=393926>

To specify that you want timestamps in wall-clock format, specify `--wall-clock=yes` in `VALGRIND_OPTS`.