This is interestingly analogous to nelhage's memory sampling approach https://blog.nelhage.com/2013/03/tracking-an-eventmachine-le... where if something is leaking "at scale", let it - then gcore it, and pick a random page of the core and see what's there. (An even cheaper variant I've used a few times with python is to just run "strings | sort | uniq -c | sort -n" on the core, so you get the most common strings which are usually part of object metadata and give you a solid hint without needing to go in with a debugger...) The ^C approach basically samples time instead of memory.