Poireau: A Sampling Allocation Debugger

Poireau: a sampling allocation debugger The libpoireau library intercepts a small fraction of calls to malloc/calloc/etc., to generate a statistically representative overview of an application's heap footprint. While the interceptor currently only tracks long-lived allocations (e.g., leaks), we plan to also implement guard pages, in the spirit of Electric Fence. The sampling approach makes it possible to use this library in production with a minimal impact on performance (see the section on Performance overhead), and without any change to code generation, unlike, e.g., LeakSanitizer or Valgrind. The library's implementation strategy, which offloads most of the complexity to the kernel or an external analysis script, and only overrides the system memory allocator (or any other allocator that already overrides the system malloc) for the few sampled allocations, means the instrumentation is less likely to radically change a program's behaviour. Preloading libpoireau.so is much less inv ... Read full article.