The chromium ebuild has a use flag tcmalloc. According to metadata.xml, it means: "Use bundled tcmalloc instead of system malloc." However, there's already a global tcmalloc use flag which, according to use.desc, should do: "Use the dev-util/google-perftools libraries to replace the malloc() implementation with a possibly faster one" So on a global scale, tcmalloc is there to enable tcmalloc at all, in chromium it is used to separate between bundled and system tcmalloc. I think one use flag should not be used for mixed purposes, so probably the chromium one should be renamed to something like tcmalloc-bundled. (Alternatively: I don't know if there's a strong need to be able to use the bundled tcmalloc, generally bundled libs should be avoided, so maybe it can just be removed)
The tcmalloc use flag does NOT toggle between bundled tcmalloc and system tcmalloc. Rather, it toggles between building against tcmalloc (which happens to be bundled), or traditional malloc (provided by glibc).
oh sorry, seems I misread it. Then it makes more sense. We may close this bug, but obviously this opens the question why it isn't using the system wide one. (but I know chromium+bundling is a complicated topic)
(In reply to Hanno Boeck from comment #2) > (but I know chromium+bundling is a complicated topic) I think it's solved for most libs that are actually packaged and designed to be used as shared libraries. For the tcmalloc, please see https://codereview.chromium.org/12224030 which contains several comments from other Chromium developers.
