Memory Leak Postmortem: Combining free, smem, pmap, and perf for Effective Diagnosis
When a thumbnail service experienced sudden latency spikes and OOM kills shortly after a new release, the author walks through a systematic investigation using free, smem, pmap, and perf to distinguish true memory leaks from page‑cache or shared‑page artifacts, pinpoint the native decoder buffer issue, and outline remediation steps.
