tcmalloc

[...] Quite a few problems resulted in memory leaks, but one was particularly nasty: Squid processes under high load started leaking CPU cycles somewhere. After deploying profiling for squid we actually ended up seeing that the problem is inside libc. Once we started profiling libc, one of initial assumptions appeared to be true - our heap was awfully fragmented, slowing down malloc().

Here comes our steroids part: Google has developed a drop-in malloc replacement, tcmalloc, that is really efficient. Space efficient, cpu efficient, lock efficient. This is probably mostly used (and sophisticated) libc function, that was suffering performance issues not that many people wanted to actually tackle. The description sounded really nice, so we ended up using it for our suffering Squids.

The results were what we expected - awesome :)