Re: Enhancing malloc

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On Tuesday 28 May 2013 07:11:01 Will Newton wrote:
> Internally a number of benchmarks and workloads have been shown to
> spend a relatively large amount of time in the allocator, so we've
> been looking at improving performance of glibc malloc. Specifically I
> think we would be looking more at the performance of the allocator
> itself (e.g. locking overhead) rather than it's interaction with the
> kernel VM.
> 
> If we were to submit changes to the malloc implementation what set of
> benchmark numbers would be required?
> Would it be acceptable to have build time selection of multiple malloc
> implementations?
> Is anyone else already working on this?

i wonder if we should require any changes to be preceded by the inclusion of 
tests and/or benchmarks, or maybe a new repo to hold things if those are too 
large ?  having a centralized place of memory related tests/benchmarks that 
are agreed upon in terms of "this is the baseline you should use for 
optimizing" would go a long way.  otherwise, we have one person setting up an 
environment, doing some work, and then throwing it all away once changes get 
merged which makes it harder for the next person to experiment.
-mike

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