+---------- On Oct 17, Jim Wilcoxson said: > In glancing at the zippy code, it looks like it used a power-of-2 > algorithm, so I figured it might cause less heap fragmentation. I > think that might be at least some of the problem. Does the standard > gnu/linux memory allocator handle fragmentation poorly/well?
I think the standard Linux allocator is dl-malloc, which as I recall has pretty good fragmentation properties. The reason zippy may use more memory is that it keeps a separate pool of memory for each thread. This reduces lock contention but means that less free memory is shared between threads.
