Heaptrack v1.1.0 release Better memory profiling on Linux

22.05.2018 Milian Wolff 3 comments

After more than a year of work, I’m pleased to release another version of heaptrack, the Linux memory profiler! The new version 1.1.0 comes with some new features, significant performance improvements and – most importantly – much improved stability and correctness. If you have tried version v1.0 in the past and encountered problems, update to the new v1.1 and try again!

Notable Changes

The most effort during this release cycle was spent on improving the correctness of heaptrack. The initial version suffered from bugs that could lead to corrupted or truncated data files. Heaptrack v1.1 is generally much better in this regard, and you should be able to use it in more situations than before. Furthermore, attaching heaptrack to an already-running process will catch more allocations and thus produce more accurate data. To verify the quality of the heaptrack code base, more tests have been added as well. These tests also finally enable us to use Valgrind or the Sanitizers on most of the heaptrack code, which wasn’t possible previously. Additionally, some important new features have been added which greatly improve the usability of heaptrack:

1. When extended debug information is available, stack traces now include inlined frames.
2. Split debug information in separate files is now supported.
3. Compressed debug information is properly handled.
4. The embedded flamegraph view is now searchable.

Finally, quite some work went into optimizing heaptrack to further reduce its overhead. The initial version was quite good already from a performance point of view, but version 1.1 is even better! Most notably, the analysis of large data files is now often much faster. This is in great parts due to the new optional dependency on zstd. This fantastic state-of-the-art compression algorithm greatly reduces the CPU overhead during recording while compressing the heaptrack data. But not only that – decompression at analysis time is significantly reduced compared to the standard gzip compression. In case you wonder: Data files are now often slightly smaller too! Last but not least, heaptrack v1.1.0 can be downloaded as a portable AppImage which should run on most 64bit Linux systems in use these days!

Download heaptrack v1.1.0

If possible, wait for your distribution to provide you with an updated package for heaptrack v1.1.0. Otherwise, download the AppImage, make it executable and run it. If neither of these two options works for you, grab the sources and compile the code for your target platform:

• 64bit AppImage: heaptrack-v1.1.0-x86_64.AppImage (GPG signature)
• Sources: heaptrack-1.1.0.tar.xz (GPG signature)

The GPG signatures have been created by Milian Wolff with the key A0C6B72C4F1C5E7C. Many thanks to the various people who contributed to this release. Please continue to hand in your patches, preferably via KDE’s phabricator instance or via heaptrack on GitHub. Bugs can be reported on bugs.kde.org. If your company needs commercial support for heaptrack, then get in touch with us at KDAB. We offer workshops and trainings specifically about profiling and debugging on Linux.