Using jemalloc for Large-scale Memory Debugging

jemalloc is a high performance memory allocator that Facebook has enhanced to provide extensive monitoring and debugging facilities. Dedicated memory debugging tools such as Valgrind are invaluable in many cases, but they tend to be impractical for large-footprint and long-running applications, whereas jemalloc can provide detailed allocation statistics with minimal additional overhead. This makes jemalloc useful for diagnosing memory leaks and application logic problems that don’t tend to show up as hard errors. This presentation will briefly introduce jemalloc, then dive into concrete examples of memory monitoring and debugging.