I'm surprised Daniel didn't use valgrind's massif tool for this. It's a really brilliant way to visualise what heap structures are using memory in C programs.
The increase in the number of allocations is actually a bad sign for performance even if the memory usage is lower. It is good that they are tracking it but the trend is still not great.
I'm surprised Daniel didn't use valgrind's massif tool for this. It's a really brilliant way to visualise what heap structures are using memory in C programs.
https://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html
Here's the output of massif from the curl command that is used in the posting:
http://oirase.annexia.org/curl-8.18.0-massif.txt
The increase in the number of allocations is actually a bad sign for performance even if the memory usage is lower. It is good that they are tracking it but the trend is still not great.
1.6% degradation in 5 years is probably better than 99% of actively developed software products