Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 08:04:50 -0500 From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Andrew MacIntyre <andymac@bullseye.apana.org.au> Cc: Jason Henson <jason@ec.rr.com> Subject: Re: malloc vs ptmalloc2 Message-ID: <20050214130450.GA55300@VARK.MIT.EDU> In-Reply-To: <42108243.9030800@bullseye.apana.org.au> References: <1108277558l.86500l.0l@BARTON> <20050213082128.GA68307@VARK.MIT.EDU> <42108243.9030800@bullseye.apana.org.au>
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On Mon, Feb 14, 2005, Andrew MacIntyre wrote: > David Schultz wrote: > >Other than that, I don't know enough > >details about ptmalloc to speculate, except to say that for most > >real-world workloads on modern systems, the impact of the malloc > >implementation is likely to be negligible. Of course, test > >results would be interesting... > > Some language interpreters by design malloc()/realloc()/free() memory > constantly. Python being a well known example of such an interpreter. > > Because the issues with memory allocators are legion in the context of a > multitude of platforms, Python eventually gained a highly specialised > allocator geared to its usage patterns (which brought some other > benefits with it too). I think I've seen references to Perl doing > something similar. Right, databases, language runtimes, and the small set of other applications for which it really matters usually have their own special-purpose allocators. I was counting on that when I said that replacing malloc() is unlikely to make a big difference. (One could argue, of course, that it's unfortunate that applications need to do so.)
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