Get the latest tech news
Poireau: A Sampling Allocation Debugger
Poireau: a sampling allocation debugger. Contribute to backtrace-labs/poireau development by creating an account on GitHub.
For application servers, and other workloads that expect to enter a steady state quickly after startup, that is more useful than only reporting unreachable objects: a slow growth in heap footprint is an issue, even if the culprits are reachable, e.g., in a list that isn't getting cleared when it should be. That being said, here are a couple microbenchmark to try and upper bound the overhead of LD_PRELOAD ing in libpoireau.so, by repeatedly making pairs of calls to malloc and free(a best case for most memory allocators) in a single thread. In practice, a performance sensitive program hopefully spends less than 10% of its time in memory management (and much less than that in large allocations), which means the total overhead introduced by libpoireau and capturing stack traces is probably closer to 1-5%.
Or read this on Hacker News