perl malloc slow?

[Holger Kipp]

Alexander Leidinger (Alexander at Leidinger.net) wrote: 
>
>On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 11:29:05 +0000
>Holger Kipp <Holger.Kipp at alogis.com> wrote:
>
>> Searching on the internet gave the impression that this might be
>> malloc/FreeBSD related. Any chance of this being resolved?
>
>Use perls own malloc implementation (make -DWITHOUT_PERL_MALLOC for an
>up-to-date perl5.8 port, if you use make -DWITH_THREADS perls own malloc
>implementation gets disabled by the FreeBSD port)? AFAIK perl 5.0 in the
>4.x basesystem doesn't use its own malloc implementation.

Upgraded Perl 5.8.0 to 5.8.2 which has these switches set already, so I 
guess the problem is well-known.

Kris Kennaway wrote: "For any algorithm one can come up with a workload that
  makes it perform badly.  The trick is making it perform well for
  common workloads, which FreeBSD's malloc does."
(http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2003-September/003059.html)

Even so, if Perl malloc and Linux malloc are O(n) with a small constant and
FreeBSD malloc behaves like O(n*n) or worse with a large constant in this
easy example (of a real-world applikation), this behaviour should imho be
investigated....

See also http://www.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de/~wmglo/malloc-slides.html

Regards,
Holger