Investigate Excessive Memory Allocation in GitHub Action Job Build Test for macOS

[hendriknielaender]

Description

During the recent build and test job on macOS using GitHub Actions, we encountered an issue where the memory allocated for a fixed buffer was insufficient, causing the build to fail. As a temporary fix, we increased the memory allocation from 4096 to 8192, which successfully allowed the build to complete. However, this increase seems to be an overkill, especially since the memory allocation is primarily used for storing a simple values (u8/u32/u64).

Steps to Reproduce

1. Run the build and test job on macOS using GitHub Actions with the buffer size set to 4096.
2. Observe the failure due to insufficient memory allocation.
3. Increase the buffer size to 8192.
4. Observe the build successfully completes.

Expected Behavior

The buffer size should be optimized and not require such a significant increase for storing small data types like an integer.

Actual Behavior

The build fails with the buffer size set to 4096 but succeeds when the buffer size is increased to 8192. This suggests that there may be an underlying inefficiency or bug causing more memory to be allocated than expected.

Investigation

• Review the memory allocation logic within the build process.
• Determine why a simple integer value would require such a large buffer.
• Investigate if there are any memory leaks or inefficiencies in the way memory is being managed.
• Explore if any recent changes could have introduced this issue.

Temporary Fix

As a temporary fix, we increased the buffer size from 4096 to 8192. This allows the build to proceed, but it is not an ideal long-term solution.

https://github.com/hendriknielaender/zBench/actions/runs/10440254418/job/28909931403

[FObersteiner]

sounds like an application for zBench's memory-tracking feature :)