CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++linuxmemory-management
Hassan Syed
Hassan Syed

Reputation: 20485

Why does ubuntu ship with a memory allocator that is 2x slower than google tcmalloc?

benchmarks here:

On the use and abuse of alloca

I assume the same holds for other Unices, when google perftools exists, and it is 2x (a bit more) faster than a standard allocator, why then do distributions still ship with sub-optimal ones ? Bearing in mind that tcmalloc has been available for 5+ years.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 679

Answers (1)

AshleysBrain
AshleysBrain

Reputation: 22591

It's rare that something is quite simply "2x faster" than something else. It might be 2x faster 90% of the time, and 10x slower 10% of the time. For a general system allocator, you want something that does fairly well all the time, rather than very-good-at-specific-cases. That's probably why the default allocator isn't tcmalloc - it needs to be at least OK-ish at everything, rather than super specialised.

Upvotes: 4

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