Function crashing in release mode but runs flawless in debugger - c

Question

My program crashes on this function on the 7th line, when I call malloc() when I run in release mode I get the `Program.exe has stopped working message, and when I run in debugger, most of the time it succeeds but sometimes I get this message (especially on larger input):
MONOM* polynomialsProduct(MONOM* poly1, int size1, MONOM* poly2, int size2, int* productSize)
{
int i1, i2;
int phSize = 1, logSize = 0;
MONOM* product;
product = (MONOM*)malloc(phSize*sizeof(MONOM));
monomAllocationVerification(product);
for (i1 = 0; i1 < size1; i1++)
{
for (i2 = 0; i2 < size2; i2++)
{
if (logSize == phSize)
{
phSize *= 2;
product = (MONOM*)realloc(product,phSize*sizeof(MONOM));
monomAllocationVerification(product);
}
product[logSize].coefficient = poly1[i1].coefficient * poly2[i2].coefficient;
product[logSize].power = poly1[i1].power + poly2[i2].power;
logSize++;
}
}
mergeSort(product,logSize);
*productSize = sumMonomsWithSamePower(product, logSize);
return product;
}
I understand that I'm dealing with memory errors and problems, but is there any quick way to analyze my code and look for memory errors? I look at my code a dozen of times looking for this kind of errors and found nothing. (I didn't want to post the code here since its 420 lines long).

Answer 1

First of all, if heap corruption is detected on the first malloc, that means it happened earlier (not in this function or on previous pass). So the problem may lie outside this code.
However, the code also looks suspicious to me.
monomAllocationVerification has no size parameter, so it should work on one monom only, yet you call it only once after realloc on pointer to first element, despite having allocated space for quite a few monoms. Please clarify your decision.
It is a bit unclear why sumMonomsWithSamePower should return a size, and thus modify an array to store a value. May be a quirk, but still suspicious.
UPDATE
The problem was in other functions; a few reallocs with wrong size.

Answer 2

I would check the return value of malloc() and use perror() to describe what error has occured. Also here is the documentation for malloc() and perror().
if((product = (MONOM*)malloc(phSize*sizeof(MONOM))) == NULL)
{
perror("ERROR: Failed to malloc ");
return 1;
//perror() will display a system specified string to describe the error it may tell you the error
}
Also do you know the size of MONOM? If not add the following line to your code.
printf("MONOM SIZE = %i\n", sizeof(MONOM));