Real World Perl: Analyze Chrome's heap

Feb 19, 2018 by David Farrell

Welcome to Real World Perl, a series that aims to showcase everyday uses of Perl. Got a suggestion for a Real World Perl example? email me.

When ordinary tools fail, many programmers reach for Perl. Matthew Hodgson ran into trouble analyzing the Chrome Browser’s heap dump file: the programs he used kept running out of memory for large (> 2GB) files. So he whipped up a “quick and dirty” Perl script to do it. Instead of parsing the entire heap dump into memory, it saves resources by processing the data one line at a time.

To use the script, you first need a Chrome heap dump file. To get one, launch Chrome, go to Developer tools -> Memory -> Take heap snapshot. Save the file locally.

$ ./heap-analyser.pl /path/to.heapsnapshot > heap-stats.csv

This will save the statistics in a tab separated format in the file heap-stats.csv. From there you can import the file into your favorite spreadsheet software, for further investigation. Matthew has an example of this in the project repo.

Cover image from pixabay