Leak detection with tcmalloc

• January 14, 2015
• linux  
• malloc  
• tcmalloc  

tcmalloc has a built-in leak detection mechanism. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to work it, even after reading the documentation. At least on Centos 7, the trick is to make sure you install the pprof package as well as gperftools-libs package. You will also need to set the PPROF_PATH environment variable so that the tcmalloc runtime can find proof. If you don’t do this, then the leaks report will not resolve symbols, so the stack traces will not be that useful.

Note that by default, the leak report is emitted on exit, so it if your program calls _exit() or aborts, you won’t get any report. If you are trying to check TrafficServer, it’s worth building with --disable-freelist to avoid false positives and verify any possible freelist leaks.