Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 15:00:17 +0800 From: Yusuf Goolamabbas <yusufg@outblaze.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Perl 5.8.1-RC4 release notes mention FreeBSD malloc upto 200 times slower than perl malloc Message-ID: <20030909070017.GA19395@outblaze.com>
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In the Perl 5.8.1-RC4 release notes posted here http://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2003/perl-5.8.1-RC4.html it mentions about the Platform specific problems seen by the Perl development team. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FreeBSD: malloc dilemma The choice of malloc (the C-level memory management interface) when building Perl is problematic in FreeBSD. Using FreeBSD's system malloc for Perl was found to be very slow: in some cases that was 200 times slower than using the Perl malloc. One such case is file input: for example # slurping the whole compressed Perl source code into $a if (open F,"perl-5.8.1.tar.gz") { local $/; $a=<F> } is about 200-250 times slower with the system malloc than with the Perl malloc. One could use Perl's malloc (Configure -Dusemymalloc), but that was found to cause random core dumps in FreeBSD with multithreaded programs. No such problems were found in other platforms, however. A decision was made to stick with the system malloc, regardless of the performance problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe the test case can assist FreeBSD kernel hackers to make malloc faster. Regards, Yusuf
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