Poireau: A Sampling Allocation Debugger
a year ago
- #linux
- #memory-profiling
- #performance
- libpoireau library intercepts a small fraction of malloc/calloc calls to generate a heap footprint overview.
- Plans to implement guard pages similar to Electric Fence for additional security.
- Sampling approach minimizes performance impact, making it suitable for production use.
- Offloads complexity to the kernel or external scripts, reducing invasiveness compared to tools like LeakSanitizer or Valgrind.
- Reports old allocations rather than scanning for references, useful for detecting slow heap growth.
- Targets Linux 4.8+ on 64-bit platforms with 4 KB pages.
- Requires GCC-compatible C11 implementation and LD_PRELOAD for instrumentation.
- Uses Linux perf for tracepoint registration and event generation.
- Provides various signals (SIGHUP, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2) for interacting with poireau.py to get allocation reports.
- Performance overhead ranges from 5-20% for small/medium allocations to ~70% for large allocations.
- Includes code derived from xoshiro 256+ 1.0 and Systemtap's sys/sdt.h, both in the public domain.