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gperftools

(originally Google Performance Tools)

The fastest malloc we’ve seen; works particularly well with threads and STL. Also: thread-friendly heap-checker, heap-profiler, and cpu-profiler.

Overview

gperftools is a collection of a high-performance multi-threaded malloc() implementation, plus some pretty nifty performance analysis tools.

gperftools is distributed under the terms of the BSD License.

Downloads

For downloads, please visit our Downloads Page.

Documentation

• Thread-caching (TC) malloc (docs/tcmalloc.html)

• Heap-checking using tcmalloc (docs/heap_checker.html)

• Heap-profiling using tcmalloc (docs/heapprofile.html)

• CPU profiler (docs/cpuprofile.html)

• pprof and Remote Servers (docs/pprof_remote_servers.html)

Example

Note: this is by no means complete documentation, but simply gives you an idea of what the API is like.

No recompilation is necessary to use these tools.

TC Malloc:

gcc [...] -ltcmalloc

Heap Checker:

gcc [...] -o myprogram -ltcmalloc
HEAPCHECK=normal ./myprogram

Heap Profiler:

gcc [...] -o myprogram -ltcmalloc
HEAPPROFILE=/tmp/netheap ./myprogram

Cpu Profiler:

gcc [...] -o myprogram -lprofiler
CPUPROFILE=/tmp/profile ./myprogram

Sample Output

The heap profiler can pop up a window that displays information as a directed graph:

The cpu profiler can produce a weighted call graph:

Links to Other Sites

• tcmalloc documentation in Chinese (against perftools 0.94)

• Russ Cox’s gperftools-httpd, a simple http server based on thttpd that enables remote profiling via google-perftool’s pprof.

• robbinfan’s cloud-perf, a simple web service that enables remote profiling and generate svg/flamegraph via pprof.

Questions and Feedback

If you have questions, comments, or feedback, please direct them to gperftools@googlegroups.com.