talloc vs malloc speed

[Andreas Schneider]

On Friday, 14 April 2023 23:02:43 CEST Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Andreas Schneider via samba-technical:
> > I wonder if it would be possible to give the optimizer more hints. Maybe
> > Florian has some ideas :-)
> 
> You need to check that with optimization, the compiler does not elide
> malloc/free calls completely.  That might give malloc an unfair
> advantage.  GCC knows that malloc/free have no observable side effect,
> so if it can see the whole program, it sometimes can turn heap
> allocations into stack allocations.  GCC also knows that memory returned
> by malloc cannot alias anything, and that writes to the object before
> free can be eliminated.  The latter might be meaningful for
> microbenchmarks.
> 
> Some of these behaviors can be enabled through function attributes,
> however I'm not sure how much of that would be correct for talloc.  If I
> recall correctly, it has destructor callbacks, which means that
> arbitrary code can run on free, and that rules out dead store
> elimination.

Yes, we have support for destructor callbacks. Can you point me to the 
attributes which might help talloc?

> If talloc is layered on top of system malloc, using its own allocator
> geared to its particular metadata requirements could reduce memory
> overhead and make certain things go faster, but it's also a lot of work.

talloc is basically a bunch of pointer arithmetic around malloc()/free() call.

It has desctructors and also keeps track of the hierarchy. So you can free a 
an allocated pointer with all its children.

Interesting that those few pointer calculations make it so much slower.


	Andreas

-- 
Andreas Schneider                      asn at samba.org
Samba Team                             www.samba.org
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