How can I prevent Valgrind from starting embedded gdbservers for every new thread?

Question

I'm running valgrind memcheck on a program that spawns thousands of other threads.

The other threads do not generate errors, and I don't care what happens to them.

However, Valgrind insists on opening a named pipe in /tmp every time a new thread spawns. Not only is this wasteful, it actually breaks valgrind. Sometimes valgrind doesn't clean up after itself, and then future children with the same pid (active at a later time) fail to spawn because valgrind can't make a pipe with the right name (it already exists).

How can I prevent Valgrind from making all these pipes!?!

EDIT: Flags I have already tried:

--child-silent-after-fork=yes

and things I have already ruled out:

--track-children=no (default value is no).

Answer 1

Sorry to answer my own question. Just for documentation purposes.

Running with the flag:

--vgdb=no

This is not properly documented in the man pages, since it doesn't tell you that it's going to spew pipes everywhere without the flag, but that's why it does it.

Answer 2

If you can, adjust your initial program so that you can turn the thread-spawning off with a command-line argument. Run valgrind on the result, with the thread-spawning removed.