antiguru / heap-analysis

A Rust-based tool to analyze an application's heap.

Heap analysis tool for Rust

Heap analysis is a pure-Rust implementation to track memory allocations on the heap.

Usage

Heap analysis provides a custom allocator that wraps the application's own allocator. To use it, add a dependency to this crate and declare it as the global allocator like this:

/// Global allocator wrapping other allocator.
#[global_allocator]
static ALLOC: heaptrack_rust_track::TrackingAllocator<std::alloc::System> = TrackingAllocator(std::alloc::System);

fn main() {
    ALLOC.start();
    // Rest of application
}

By default, the allocator streams its data to localhost:64123. This address can be configured with the environment symbol HEAP_ANALYSIS_ADDR.

Example usage

1. Start the analysis program in one terminal:

   cargo run --release --bin analyze

2. Start the program to analyze in another terminal:

   cargo run --example flow_controlled --release -- -w 8

3. Observe the output of the analyze program.

Limitations

• Thread terminations are not communicated to analysis layer.
• All serialization is performed by a single thread. This thread can bottleneck the outgoing data.
• Obtaining the backtrace is slow. It gets slightly faster once all symbols have been resolved.