The fact that this can be used on a process even if you didn't plan at launch time to monitor memory usage is awesome. The main concern I'd have about using it in a production environment is performance impact. There may be no way around this (ptrace is expensive if gdb's impact on running applications is any indication), but the cost of backtracing all allocation sites is also very expensive. You may want to consider adding statistical sampling similar to what tcmalloc and jemalloc use for heap profiling, to reduce the performance impact and make it feasible to remain attached for longer periods of time.