Malloc Geiger Counter

Here I was hoping this was something about repurposing RAM as an actual geiger counter by measuring radiation-induced bit flips.

Sometimes I miss being able to hear the hard disk read heads moving around. It was a surprisingly accurate way to tell what your computer was up to. Someone must have made a simulation of this, right?

Here&#x27;s a similar thing I did once...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gordol&#x2F;ld_preload-sounds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gordol&#x2F;ld_preload-sounds</a><p>Generates WAV output by hooking malloc() and read().<p>You can totally hear the standard libraries loading in, I started this thing on a whim of silliness...<p>It started out as just 38 lines of code.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gordol&#x2F;ld_preload-sounds&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2d51b3e7bf857fdc5b594ea61f3b90f087fe7ef5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gordol&#x2F;ld_preload-sounds&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2d51b3e7b...</a>

I think projects like this, which try to give normally invisible qualities of software some corporeal existence, are really important. Obviously this is too course-grained for diagnosing specific problems, but in environments like our phones or our full desktop environments, being able to turn on feedback about what is taking resources and how has the potential to help us build general feelings about particular ecosystems.

I have been Linux only for 10 years, so I cannot try.<p>I have used similar tricks with gdb to play a sound when some high-level function is called, can be really useful. However, for malloc I would expect it to be called so often that a human cannot hear the difference. Or the program needs to measure the rate and select the tone according to the rate. Of course it depends on the program, but at least if there is enough allocation to be worried.

This is actually a brilliant idea.<p>If you change the pitch by the allocated chunk size (maybe in log scale) or use different sound for free(), someone could be actually detecting memory leaks just by listening to the app.

People did this with network utilization decades ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;techsessionssummary&#x2F;peep-network-auralizer-monitoring-your-network-sound" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;techsessionssummary&#x2F;peep-network-aura...</a>

While some say here that they are disappointed that this isnt abour radioactivity, for me it was the opposite. Wheb reading the headline I thought, oh no not another one of those, wondering though how you can get malloc in.<p>Read it, and I think this is actually a great new idea.

Back in the day sysadmins would just hooks up the least-significant address line to a speaker. That way they could monitor the mainframe aurally while reading and drinking coffee instead of watching the bank of flashing lights.

Here&#x27;s a version for Go: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lukechampine&#x2F;geiger" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lukechampine&#x2F;geiger</a>

What a strange, but interesting, idea!<p>The broader idea here is that there are probably an infinite number of creative ways -- to measure different aspects of what software does, and to instrument that output in different creative ways that can be experienced via human senses (in this case, via sound).

Thanks goodness this is not a renaming&#x2F;rediscovery&#x2F;attribution-hijacking of a well-known and old concept (reference count, allocation count, etc.), something every other person these days seems be engaged in.

This is really cool! It just occurred to me that the same approach would work to identify non-sequential reads from applications that access data from disk&#x2F;tape. Thanks a lot for sharing this project with us :-)

well I&#x27;m sure as hell not using this on any Haskell* code (imagine we apply the malloc sound effect to generic allocation)<p>* Any GC&#x27;d language really, JS, Java w&#x2F;generics etc