Re: Cygwin multithreading performance

[Mark Geisert <mark@maxrnd.com>]

John Hein wrote:
> Mark Geisert wrote at 23:45 -0800 on Nov 22, 2015:
>   > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>   > > On Nov 21 01:21, Mark Geisert wrote:
>   > [...] so I wonder if there's
>   > >> some unintentional serialization going on somewhere, but I don't know yet
>   > >> how I could verify that theory.
>   > >
>   > > If I'm allowed to make an educated guess, the big serializer in Cygwin
>   > > are probably the calls to malloc, calloc, realloc, free.  We desperately
>   > > need a new malloc implementation better suited to multi-threading.
>   >
>   > That's very helpful to know.  I'd want to first make sure the heavy lock
>   > activity I'm seeing in the traces really is due to malloc() and friends
>   > but I couldn't help a speculative search online for multithread-safe
>   > malloc().  These turned up:
>   >      tcmalloc - part of google-perftools, requires libunwind, evidently
>   > not yet ported to Windows AFAICT,
>   >      nedmalloc - http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/
>   >      ptmalloc - http://www.malloc.de/
>   >
>   > The latter two are based on Doug Lea's dlmalloc which is also the basis
>   > of Cygwin's malloc() functions.  As I understand it, ptmalloc in one
>   > form or another has been part of glibc on Linux for some time.
>   >
>   > So there may be a solution in sight if we need to go that direction.  Of
>   > course, SHTDI as usual :).
>   >
>   > ...mark
>
> Someone recently mentioned on this list they were working on porting
> jemalloc.  That would be a good choice.

Indeed; thanks for the reminder.  Somehow I hadn't followed that thread.

..mark


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple