Heaptrack

Heaptrack is a Linux memory profiler designed to help developers identify heap allocations and memory leaks in C and C++ programs. It records every allocation and deallocation along with a stack trace, enabling precise attribution of memory use to code paths.

How it works: Heaptrack intercepts memory allocation calls by using a runtime shim loaded via LD_PRELOAD. It hooks malloc, free, calloc, realloc, and optionally C++ operator new/delete, recording size, pointer, timestamp, thread ID, and the call stack. When an allocation is freed, the corresponding record is linked; the tool can report leaked allocations after program exit. Heap lifetime and fragmentation can be analyzed through the collected data.

Output and visualization: The profiler writes a .heaptrack file that can be opened with the heaptrack_gui graphical viewer or with external tools like KCacheGrind for visualization. The GUI provides per-call-stack views, allocation hotspots, and filtering; it supports comparing multiple runs to identify regressions. The data can be post-processed to produce summaries of peak memory usage and lifetime distributions.

Usage: To profile a program, invoke heaptrack with the target executable and its arguments, for example: heaptrack ./myapp arg1 arg2. After termination, open the resulting .heaptrack file with the GUI to browse allocations. Symbols are clearer when the program is built with debugging information (-g). It runs on Linux and supports multi-threaded programs.

See also: Heaptrack is open-source and commonly used as an alternative or complement to other profilers like Valgrind’s massif and various perf-based tools.