On 1/8/26 10:00, Tor at 1AEO via tor-relays wrote:
Results: allocator choice dominates steady-state RSS outcomes. Using mimalloc 2.x and jemalloc 5.x produced large, sustained reductions in resident memory, on the order of 70–80 percent, compared to the default glibc malloc; tcmalloc showed a smaller but measurable improvement.
At a hardened stable Gentoo Linux bare metal server there're no significant changes seen for relays using htop, maybe few 100 MiB less VIRT in the first few days. At tiny VPS (1 GiB RAM, 2 GiB swap file) using Debian Trixie and libmimalloc3 about 200-400 MiB less swap file consumption were observed.
By contrast, the two commonly cited configuration parameters, MaxMemInQueues and MaxConsensusAgeForDiffs, showed little to no impact on steady-state RSS when adjusted in isolation. +1
BTW I filed [1] a while ago. If you would set the common stats parameter to zero, would that have an impact on the mem usage? [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40958 -- Toralf