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Re: The direction of malloc?


On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 09:15:01AM +0000, Will Newton wrote:
> On 11 December 2013 02:31, Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:05:41PM +0100, OndÅej BÃlka wrote:
> >> > * Should we provide thread cache blocks to do provide some lockless allocation?
> >>
> >> This is most low-hanging fruit that I aim for. We already use tls to
> >> determine arena so this should not be a issue.
> >>
> >> We have fastbins that sorta do this but with several problems.
> >> 1. They are not really lockless, for malloc they need a lock, only
> >> freeing will be when bug 15073 gets fixed.
> >>
> >> Second problem is that fastbins are per-arena not per-thread which
> >> forces us to use atomic operations. These are expensive (typicaly more than 50 cycles).
> >>
> >> Moving these to per-thread bins mostly just needs refactoring of current
> >> code to one that makes more sense.
> >
> > With arenas-per-thread, you essentially have contention-free access,
> > which is not the same thing as lock-free, but not much worse.  You'll
> > have lock contention in per-thread arenas only when there are more
> > threads than arenas, which in the default case means that you have
> > more threads than twice the number of cores, which is too many threads
> > anyway.
> 
> Lock contention would be worse, but still the atomic instructions
> required to lock/unlock the arena is the hottest part of the profile
> on many single-threaded malloc workloads.
> 
> If we are going to get a new malloc or update the old one I think the
> fast path being lock-free should be a requirement.

I think I misread Ondrej's post and thought he meant 'lock contention'
when he actually only mentioned 'cost of atomic operations'.  I agree
that we need a lockless fast path.

Siddhesh


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