gperftools/gperftools

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

8982 stars · 1538 forks observed · 2026-10-15

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

gperftools (Google Performance Tools) is a collection of high-performance multi-threaded malloc implementations (tcmalloc) plus CPU and heap profiling tools for C/C++ applications. It links into existing binaries via -ltcmalloc or LD_PRELOAD and produces profiles analyzable with pprof.

Use cases

• profile cpu usage of a c++ program
• find memory leaks with heap profiling
• speed up multithreaded application allocation with tcmalloc
• profile a binary I didn't compile via LD_PRELOAD
• analyze heap usage over time
• replace malloc for better multithreaded performance

When to choose

• you need a fast multithreaded malloc replacement for C/C++
• you want CPU or heap profiling on Linux/macOS with pprof integration
• you need to profile binaries without recompiling

When to avoid

• you need profiling on Windows (profilers unsupported there)
• you want modern Go-based pprof tooling itself (use google/pprof)
• you need memory-safe or managed-language profiling

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

benchmarking monitoring caching developer-tools performance backend cpp cross-platform tcmalloc memory-allocator profiling heap-profiler cpu-profiler linux macos

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