🧠 Memory Management Analyzer

This project demonstrates how different memory allocation methods (malloc, calloc, and mmap) perform in terms of speed and memory usage in a simulated workload.

📜 Description

The program dynamically allocates and frees memory blocks of varying sizes, measuring:

Allocation and deallocation times.
Memory usage via /proc/self/status or /proc/self/statm.
Peak memory consumption during execution.

It produces a report comparing performance across allocation methods.

🚀 Features

Dynamic Allocation Testing – compares malloc, calloc, and mmap.
Performance Metrics – measures allocation/deallocation times.
Memory Usage Tracking – monitors real-time process memory usage.
Optional Memory Leak Simulation – detects unfreed memory using Valgrind.
CLI Mode Selection – choose allocator at runtime (--malloc, --calloc, --mmap).

🛠️ Build

make

▶️ Run

./mem_analyzer --malloc
./mem_analyzer --calloc
./mem_analyzer --mmap

🧪 Test & Debug

make valgrind

📊 Example Output

Allocator: malloc
Blocks: 10000
Average Allocation Time: 0.24 μs
Average Free Time: 0.18 μs
Peak Memory Usage: 2.5 MB

📂 Project Structure

mem_analyzer/
 ├── README.md
 ├── Makefile
 └── main.c

🔍 Learning Objectives

Understand differences between malloc, calloc, and mmap.
Learn to measure memory usage through /proc.
Practice debugging memory errors with Valgrind.
Gain insight into memory allocation strategies in Linux.

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