After firing the service running this application I thought that stuff would run smoothly. Rust is an efficient memory user, right? Wrong. In a matter of hours this rather small application began to consume memory.

What did I do wrong?

• Was I using clone() all over? Not at all.
• Did I mistakenly create a memory-leaky application by using use std::mem; somewhere? Nope.

So why was this application consuming so much memory? Turns out that when you cargo build --release you get a binary that is optimized for performance and speed. The binary is statically-linked to its libraries and allots contiguous memory big enough for it to run fast. And its threading capabilities are also factored in when the binary creates this memory allotment. During its memory allocation and deallocation it creates fragments that grow over time. This in turn creates the problem of Heap Fragmentation. This was what was consuming up all of my server's memory to a point where the server had to kill and restart the service. A bad production experience I might say.

Time to figure out how to solve this problem. I must say this is going to be one long journey.

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