[kisielk]

Good point about the 3rd party libraries there, it's true that even if you do your own cleanup after manual mallocs, you can't do much about theirs.

Do you have an example of documentation that shows how to configure malloc to do some cleanup in the case of failure? Based on the Linux manpages I can't really see any obvious way to do this short of preloading some kind of malloc wrapper that's custom-written for the application.

[tptacek]

I think it may depend on the distro (on Ubuntu, for instance, you can set MALLOC_CHECK_ to 2 to force aborts on errors --- but this also forces the use of a debugging malloc, and you should care about malloc performance).

So what I'd recommend is, grab Jason Evans' jemalloc package and use that (it's good enough for Facebook!).