Solaris libumem port on the works
Jason Evans
jasone at FreeBSD.org
Wed Mar 15 19:11:50 UTC 2006
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
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