We are in a situation that have a large application and now there is a situation that would need to know which .so module is allocating how much memory. I have no idea here, I was wondering a custom allocator overriding operator new, but that didn't help because I still cannot trace which module is doing to allocation. Replacing new by custom allocator would be terrible amount of work. Does anyone know how can I tell which module is doing how much allocations ?
2 Answers
It's not easy.
You can hook malloc, free, realloc globally in the application. Corresponding articles on Stackoverflow: How to use __malloc_hook?, An alternative for the deprecated __malloc_hook functionality of glibc.
You can retrieve a caller address from that hooks using __builtin_return_address and compare it with addresses of shared libraries. Maybe you have to examine a deeper frame address to get a proper address in a library, not an address of libc++. Read this Stackoverflow article __builtin_return_address returns null for index >0?.
You could make use of the LD_PRELOAD trick to hook malloc, realloc, free etc. That, combined with the info gleaned from boost.stacktrace would get you most (if not all) of what you need. Not trivial though.
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