glibc application holding onto unused memory until just before exit

Question

I have a C++ application (gcc 4.9.1, glibc 2.17) running on Linux (Centos 7). It uses various third-party libraries, notably Boost 1.61. As the application runs, I can watch

Answer 1

You can profile your memory allocation using valgrind --tool=massif ./executable

Check out the documentation at http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html

Then once you have profiling data you can apply memory pools and other techniques. Since you already use Boost you can find several such tools in Boost.