Heap memory fragmentation in long-running C/C++ services causes 2-7x performance degradation over 24-72 hours with no crash or error signal

Long-running C and C++ services (game servers, trading systems, telecom infrastructure, embedded media devices) that perform frequent dynamic allocation and deallocation develop heap fragmentation over time: free memory exists but is scattered in non-contiguous small blocks. The default glibc malloc allocator's free-list search becomes progressively slower as fragmentation increases. So what? A documented case showed video startup latency on a TV box increasing from 1 second to 7 seconds after 24 hours of operation due purely to fragmentation, with no memory leak present. So what? For latency-sensitive systems like trading platforms, this means execution times drift from microseconds to milliseconds over a trading day, causing missed arbitrage opportunities worth thousands of dollars per occurrence. So what? Operators implement periodic process restarts (every 4-12 hours) to 'defragment' by starting fresh, but this creates maintenance windows, drops active connections, and adds operational complexity. So what? In environments where restarts are not acceptable (medical devices, telecom switches, satellite systems), engineers must rewrite allocation-heavy code paths to use pool allocators or arena allocators, a specialized skill that adds months to development timelines and introduces new categories of bugs. So what? The industry lacks standardized tooling to detect fragmentation in production. Valgrind and AddressSanitizer detect leaks and overflows but not fragmentation; custom metrics must be built per allocator, meaning most teams do not know they have this problem until performance has already degraded. This persists because general-purpose allocators must handle arbitrary allocation patterns and cannot predict application-specific usage, pool/arena allocators require manual lifetime management that negates the convenience of dynamic allocation, and C/C++ standards provide no built-in fragmentation metrics or defragmentation capability.