The 'make maintainer-check' runs the testsuite using the excellent valgrind software tool. But 'ltrace -e malloc,free,realloc program -D' can do similar and then count the number of malloc/free's. ltrace is less complex then valgrind and using less memory on itself. Could be interesting to use ltrace in the testsuite too in case of valgrind troubles or to make the testsuite even more reliable.
