Solaris libumem port on the works

[Jason Evans]

John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> That's why I started work on rewriting a allocated based upon the
> paper so that it'd have a BSD license...  I haven't worked on it much,
> and now that jemalloc is here, who knows...

Are you referring to the 2001 Usenix paper by Bonwick and Adams?  That 
paper is a very interesting read, and I'm convinced that their work is 
very useful for a range of resource management problems.  However, that 
paper does not provide enough benchmarking information for general 
conclusions regarding userland malloc (libumem) performance.  libumem is 
based on a highly abstracted resource management algorithm, and as a 
result it has extra layers that are unnecessary for a userland malloc. 
I expect this to make libumem somewhat subpar for most real workloads. 
The following article provides some supporting evidence:

http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/multiproc/multiproc.html

Note though that the benchmarks in that article also fall far short of 
providing conclusive evidence regarding relative performance of the 
tested allocators.  (Definitive malloc benchmarking is Hard.)

Jason