Understanding Rust application heap memory usage with memdb

This video shows how to use the memdb command-line application on an instrumented Rust application.

Memdb is a simple open-source tool for debugging Rust application heap memory usage. It consists of a server and a client part.

It is available under FreeBSD license and can be downloaded from GitHub:
https://github.com/Arjan-Janssen/memdb.

The server is a lightweight component written in the Rust programming language that can be easily linked to an existing Rust project. It starts a web socket to report realtime statistics about dynamic memory allocations and deallocations. This approach is convenient for debugging applications running on mobile or internet-enabled embedded devices. The server adds a hook to the Rust memory allocator that is invoked by all allocations and deallocations.

The client is a command-line tool that connects to the server and captures the stream of heap operations from the socket connection. The client is a JVM application written in Kotlin. The client can capture, visualise, and load/store the memory trace generated by the server.

The captured heap operations can then be further analyzed in the client tool. There are several commands to investigate the behavior of the heap over time.