Estudo exploratório do desempenho de alocadores de memória no espaço do usuário

Abstract

The performance of memory allocation operations significantly impacts the global performance in most computing applications. Thus, the choice of a memory allocator is an important aspect when projecting more sophisticated computing systems. The strong correlation between the dynamic memory use profile and the allocator performance requires the allocator to be chosen through an experimental study. This research carried out an exploratory study on a set of six widely used memory allocators: Ptmalloc2 (standard glibc allocator), Ptmalloc3, Hoard, Miser, TCMalloc, and Jemalloc. The workloads used to evaluate the allocators were based on a characterization study on memory use of seven application, two of which for servers and five for desktops. Each allocator was evaluated regarding its response time and memory usage in a set with 648 different execution scenarios. The results showed that the allocators with the shortest mean execution time also made the best use of parallelism in scenarios with more than one thread and one processor. The allocators Jemalloc and TCMalloc were, on average, five times faster than the standard glibc allocator. Under certain conditions, the allocator Hoard provided substantial memory savings of up to 75% when compared with the other allocators assessed. These results emphasize the importance of allocator choice when projecting applications in face of the significant differences observed experimentally in this study.