> Prior to the process metadata caching, you could cause journald to go absolutely nuts querying the sending processes metadata from /proc by sending it messages full of newlines. Every newline-separated field is treated as a separate message with its own metadata to be acquired. The routines for fetching all that stuff from /proc granularly allocated and freed the data via libc as well, it was very painful.

This seems more like an indictment of journald's architecture than an argument against the cost of mallocs per-se