diff --git a/Cargo.toml b/Cargo.toml
index fc17bd7ce..85d325f7f 100644
--- a/Cargo.toml
+++ b/Cargo.toml
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@ tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
 async-trait = { version = "0.1.84" }
 serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }
 slatedb = { version = "0.2.0" }
+snmalloc-rs = { version = "0.3" }
 bytes = { version = "1" }
 object_store = { version = "0.11.1", features = ["aws", "gcp", "azure"] }
 serde_json = "1.0"
diff --git a/bin/bucketd/Cargo.toml b/bin/bucketd/Cargo.toml
index bf54edd6e..488263dbe 100644
--- a/bin/bucketd/Cargo.toml
+++ b/bin/bucketd/Cargo.toml
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ dotenv = { version = "0.15.0" }
 nexus = { path = "../../crates/nexus" }
 object_store = { workspace = true }
 tokio = { workspace = true }
+snmalloc-rs = { workspace = true }
 tracing = { version = "0.1" }
 tracing-subscriber = { version = "0.3", features = ["env-filter"] }
 
diff --git a/bin/bucketd/src/main.rs b/bin/bucketd/src/main.rs
index 73ff3fc5d..121aa3620 100644
--- a/bin/bucketd/src/main.rs
+++ b/bin/bucketd/src/main.rs
@@ -21,6 +21,9 @@ use clap::Parser;
 use dotenv::dotenv;
 use tracing_subscriber::{layer::SubscriberExt, util::SubscriberInitExt};
 
+#[global_allocator]
+static ALLOCATOR: snmalloc_rs::SnMalloc = snmalloc_rs::SnMalloc;
+
 #[tokio::main]
 #[allow(clippy::expect_used, clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::print_stdout)]
 async fn main() {