Subject: Re: Has importing the FreeBSD malloc(3) been considered?
To: None <salvet@ics.muni.cz>
From: R. C. Dowdeswell <elric@mabelode.imrryr.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 02/17/1999 11:56:22
On 919280886 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Zdenek Salvet wrote:
>
>> Another note is that I recompiled the entire system to use FreeBSD
>> malloc and things were progressing without problem for a while, but
>> there did arise one difficulty:  fsck_ffs was coring consistently
>> on one of my file systems, and when I recompiled it with NetBSD
>> malloc it stopped.  So something odd is going on there.
>> 
>> Another note is that on NetBSD-current/alpha, the FreeBSD malloc(3)
>> beats ours on all of the tests, yet on NetBSD-1.3.1/i386, the
>> FreeBSD malloc(3) is a bit slower until memory is over-committed.
>
>Have you tried to measure some non-artificial benchmark like "make build" ?
>AFAIK, NetBSD malloc is heavily optimized for small allocations,
>I remeber it had beaten GNUmalloc by large margin when I did tests
>with my malloc-intensive application some time ago.

Nope.  I was thinking about doing this one, but unfortunately on
my AlphaStation 200 4/233 a make build is a really lengthy proceedure.
(And I'd have to do quite a bit of it to get this one working,
since gcc is compiled by default with -lgnumalloc and make is not,
I'd have to basically rebuild the world with -lgnumalloc, make the
world, make the world with FreeBSD's malloc(3) (and no -lgnumalloc)
and time rebuilding the world.)

I'll try to come up with a slightly less time intensive way to do
a similar test, such as just building a kernel, and I'll come back
with the results.

 == Roland Dowdeswell
 == http://www.imrryr.org/~elric/