Recently, I was asked to constrain the memory usage of an application on Linux. Glibc provides hooks for [malloc, free, etc](http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/libc\/manual\/html_node\/Hooks-for-Malloc.html). By the way, the hook functions are responsible to guarantee thread safety — glibc doesn’t do it automatically. I used the malloc hooks in combination with a memory manager that a colleague found: TLSF. There are two implementations:<\/p>\n
* [http:\/\/tlsf.baisoku.org\/](http:\/\/tlsf.baisoku.org\/) (public domain)
\n* [http:\/\/rtportal.upv.es\/rtmalloc\/](http:\/\/rtportal.upv.es\/rtmalloc\/) (GPL)<\/p>\n
There are benefits and caveats when using a custom memory allocator. TLSF was meant to shine for real-time use, because the overhead of malloc and free are O(1) constant-time operations. On the other hand, TLSF isn’t thread-safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, I was asked to constrain the memory usage of an application on Linux. Glibc provides hooks for [malloc, free, etc](http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/libc\/manual\/html_node\/Hooks-for-Malloc.html). By the way, the hook functions are responsible to guarantee thread safety — glibc doesn’t do it automatically. I used the malloc hooks in combination with a memory manager that a colleague found: TLSF. … <\/p>\n