As mentioned on #2196 it would make our code more robust and portable if we did not accidentally rely on malloc returning zero initialised memory (which it is by no means required to do, and might in some case only do under certain memory usage patterns).
An easy soft start might be to set MALLOC_PERTURB_=123 (or even MALLOC_PERTURB_=$(($RANDOM % 255 + 1))) on some ubuntu CI runs?