Excessive memory consumption when using malloc()

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 11/25/21 13:12, Konstantin Kharlamov via Libc-help wrote:
> So there you go, you 10G of unreleased memory is a Glibc feature, no complaints
> ;-P

Freeing memory back to the OS is a form of cache invalidation, and cache
invalidation is hard and workload dependent.

In this specific case, particularly with 50MiB, you are within the 64MiB
64-bit process heap size, and the 1024-byte frees do not trigger the
performance expensive consolidation and heap reduction (which requires
a munmap syscall to release the resources).

In the case of 10GiB, and 512KiB allocations, we are talking different
behaviour. I have responded here with my recommendations:
https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-help/2021-November/006052.html

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.