You might be reading the article too literally -- you can test more than just tcmalloc, of course (ned, ptmalloc*, libumem, etc). It is -very- possible that one

You might be reading the article too literally -- you can test more than just tcmalloc, of course (ned, ptmalloc*, libumem, etc). It is -very- possible that one of these allocators will handle our memory footprint more gracefully than say, libc. There is only one way to find out: via A/B testing. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that assertions like: "I think this is pretty key, because otherwise TCMalloc is somewhat of an overhead." are a bit subjective, IMHO. Allocators are different from one another, and of course they react to a series of allocations/deallocations differently. We're trying to find out if the way we use our heap is better suited to another allocator like tcmalloc, or nedmalloc, or whatever. And RE: multi-threaded - I don't believe it will be particularly difficult to get a representative sample, but working on that isn't very high on my list right now.