I'm surprised Daniel didn't use valgrind's massif tool for this. It's a really brilliant way to visualise what heap structures are using memory in C programs.

https://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html

Here's the output of massif from the curl command that is used in the posting:

http://oirase.annexia.org/curl-8.18.0-massif.txt

The increase in the number of allocations is actually a bad sign for performance even if the memory usage is lower. It is good that they are tracking it but the trend is still not great.

1.6% degradation in 5 years is probably better than 99% of actively developed software products