Traffic Server provides five routines for allocating and freeing
memory. These routines correspond to similar routines in the C library.
For example, INKrealloc behaves like the C library
routine realloc.
There are two main reasons to use the routines
provided by Traffic Server. The first is portability: the Traffic Server
API routines behave the same on all of Traffic Server’s supported
platforms. For example, realloc does not accept an argument of NULL on some platforms. The second reason is that the
Traffic Server routines actually track the memory allocations by file
and line number. This tracking is very efficient, is always turned on,
and is useful for tracking down memory leaks.
The memory allocation functions are described below.