Heap profiler consumes a lot of memory about gperftools HOT 1 CLOSED

BTW if you you're checking leaks you should be using HEAPCHECK as opposed to 
HEAPPROFILE which is for profiling.

In both cases tcmalloc spends some memory for all allocations to track whether 
it's free or not and where it was allocated. So there is some (possibly large) 
multiplier of memory used by your app spent on tracking memory.

If I'm right than your program indeed leaks memory and tcmalloc heap profiler 
overhead simply makes it worse. In that case consider:

a) using heap checker rather than heap profiler

b) making your program exit sooner, before it exhausted all RAM

c) or consider some programmatic API that allows checking for leaks at runtime 
(see heap checker documentation)

I'm going to mark this bug as NotABug because memory usage of heap 
{profiler,checker} is by design. But there is of course some chance that you're 
hitting some bug in tcmalloc. If so, please reopen this ticket with more 
evidence after you've checked it's not your program's fault.