[doyougnu]

I think that is a fair assessment of that chapter. The goal of the chapter was to take a project that has never done any kind of optimization and to show an optimization engineering pass. Basically one has to be sure the implementation doesn't have any obvious easy to fix leaks before considering a different algorithm or something like that.

So I would argue that the real message of that chapter is demonstrating, step-by-step the methods used to find the memory leaks: info-table profiling and biographical/retainer profiling and ticky-ticky profiling.