There exists more than one type of memory leaks with different effects and different way to detect them:

• The typical memory leak: a piece of memory the gets allocated but is not freed anymore. This is the classic type of memory leak, for what C and C++ gets blamed for …

One of the tools I’m using already quite a while to profile memory usage is the built-in profiling functionality in glibc. For some reason this isn’t known very much, so I thought documenting it here makes sense, so I can simply point the people to this post, instead …

Latency heatmaps are a great way to visualize latencies which are hard to grasp from pure test data. Brendan Gregg (http://brendangregg.com) has written a great Perl script for generating such heatmaps as interactive SVG graphics. Also the flamegraphs are just awesome, but this is another story.

(Unfortunately SVGs …