[dkersten]

memory profilers tend to be fairly useless

In my own experience I've had quite a bit of success with the valgrind family of tools when I was debugging memory leaks in a GSM message codec (written in C, not a managed language) I wrote a few years ago. I guess it depends on the nature of the code and memory leaks.

I've also had some success tracing memory use with VisualVM for the purpose of finding out where memory is allocated so it could be used more efficiently (both for performance and do prevent leaks).