👀 Views: 362 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-10-17

performance memory-management security C

I'm trying to debug I'm deploying to production and I've been researching this but I'm trying to implement I've been banging my head against this for hours... In my codebase, I've been profiling a security-focused application built in C, where memory usage has become a critical concern. The application utilizes OpenSSL for cryptographic operations and involves several large data structures for managing user sessions. I noticed that during peak usage times, performance degrades significantly, particularly when handling incoming requests that involve complex encryption routines. I've already implemented basic optimizations by replacing `malloc` with `calloc` for zero-initialized memory, but the gains were minimal. Here’s a snippet of the problematic section: ```c typedef struct { char *username; char *session_key; size_t key_length; } Session; Session *create_session(const char *user) { Session *s = (Session *)malloc(sizeof(Session)); s->username = strdup(user); s->session_key = (char *)malloc(256); // Simulate key generation generate_key(s->session_key, 256); s->key_length = 256; return s; } ``` The `create_session` function is where most of the memory allocation occurs. To reduce the overhead, I considered pooling strategies or even custom memory allocators, but I’m not sure how they would fit into the existing structure without introducing complexity. I’ve read about `jemalloc` and `tcmalloc`, which are touted for performance improvements, but I’m uncertain about the integration effort and whether they’re overkill for my situation. Another angle I’ve explored is analyzing the memory footprint with `valgrind`. While it provided some insights, it also revealed that there are frequent allocations and deallocations in a tight loop when processing multiple sessions. This is where I suspect the real bottleneck lies. Has anyone else faced similar challenges while implementing secure applications in C? What strategies did you find effective for optimizing memory usage and performance, particularly in the context of cryptographic operations? Any insights on profiling tools or patterns that could lead to better results would be appreciated. I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. I'm on Windows 10 using the latest version of C. I recently upgraded to C latest. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. Cheers for any assistance! This is part of a larger REST API I'm building. Thanks for any help you can provide!