chattymalloc - a high-performance shared library based malloc tracer

Dependencies

• meson
• (clang-format, clang-tidy, yapf)

Compilation

Clone the repository. git clone https://muhq.space/software/chattymalloc.git

Build chattymalloc by running make in the repository root.

Usage

chattymalloc is designed to be used with the LD_PRELOAD mechanism. It hooks the memory allocator API and saves each allocator call and its result to a memory mapped binary file, called chattymalloc.trace, which will be stored to the current directory.

env LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libchattymalloc.so <your-binary>

The resulting binary trace file can be parsed and the results plotted using chattyparser.py.

chattyparser - a parser and plotter for chattymalloc trace files

chattyparser parses a trace file, detects allocator and application misbehavior, like double frees, produces a plain text trace, a histogram and a memory profile.

Usage

usage: chattyparser.py [-h] [--alignment ALIGNMENT ALIGNMENT] [--txt] [-v]
                       [--license]
                       trace

parse and analyze chattymalloc traces

positional arguments:
  trace                 binary trace file created by chattymalloc

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --alignment ALIGNMENT ALIGNMENT
                        export to plain text format
  --txt                 export to plain text format
  -v, --verbose         more output
  --license             print license info and exit