[acg]

Also worth looking into tcmalloc: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html

Which comes with tools: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/heap_checker.html http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/heap_profiler.html

[srean]

Also nedmalloc https://github.com/ned14/nedmalloc and hoard http://www.hoard.org/. There is some comparison between the three here http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/#FAQ The following is a snippet from that FAQ

  Is tcmalloc better or worse than nedmalloc?... nedmalloc
  is about equal to tcmalloc for threadcache-only ops and
  substantially beats it for non-threadcache ops. nedmalloc
  is also written in C rather than C++ and v0.5 of tcmalloc
  only works on Unix systems and not win32. tcmalloc
  achieves its speed by never returning memory to the
  system - free space reclamation is one of the slowest
  parts of any allocator. Therefore tcmalloc should NOT be
  used outside long running server processes (and indeed
  its own docs say the same).

However I am not sure if the criticism about not returning the memory is true anymore for the latest version tcmalloc.