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The readme was considerably out of date, with the introduction
being over a year old.  This commit reflects the developments and
improvements in stabiity of snmalloc.
This commit is contained in:
Matthew Parkinson
2020-02-28 09:03:41 +00:00
parent 8723ae2443
commit 040c878c6e
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README.md
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# snmalloc
snmalloc is a research allocator. Its key design features are:
snmalloc is a high-performance allocator.
snmalloc can be used directly in a project as a header-only C++ library,
it can be `LD_PRELOAD`ed on Elf platforms (e.g. Linux, BSD),
and there is a [crate](https://crates.io/crates/snmalloc-rs) to use it from Rust.
Its key design features are:
* Memory that is freed by the same thread that allocated it does not require any
synchronising operations.
* Freeing memory in a different thread to initially allocated it, does not take
any locks and instead uses a novel message passing scheme to return the
memory to the original allocator, where it is recycled.
memory to the original allocator, where it is recycled. This enables 1000s of remote
deallocations to be performed with only a single atomic operation enabling great
scaling with core count.
* The allocator uses large ranges of pages to reduce the amount of meta-data
required.
* The fast paths are highly optimised with just two branches on the fast path
for malloc (On Linux compiled with Clang).
* The platform dependencies are abstracted away to enable porting to other platforms.
Details about snmalloc's design can be found in the
[accompanying paper](snmalloc.pdf). Differences between the paper and the
snmalloc's design is particular well suited to the following two difficult
scenarios that can be problematic for other allocators:
* Allocations on one thread are freed by a different thread
* Deallocations occur in large batches
Both of these can cause massive reductions in performance of other allocators, but
do not for snmalloc.
Comprehensive details about snmalloc's design can be found in the
[accompanying paper](snmalloc.pdf), and differences between the paper and the
current implementation are [described here](difference.md).
Since writing the paper, the performance of snmalloc has improved considerably.
[![Build Status](https://dev.azure.com/snmalloc/snmalloc/_apis/build/status/Microsoft.snmalloc?branchName=master)](https://dev.azure.com/snmalloc/snmalloc/_build/latest?definitionId=1?branchName=master)