After a system runs for a long time, the available memory may decrease, and some services may fail. This is a typical memory leak issue that is usually difficult to predict and identify. Heap profilers are useful tools to solve such problems. They keep track of memory allocations and help you figure out what is in the program heap and locate memory leaks.

This article introduces how to use heap profilers, and how widely-used heap profilers, such as Go heap profiler, gperftools, jemalloc and Bytehound, are designed and implemented. I hope this article can help you better understand and use heap profilers for your own projects.