After having pored through the code in OpenLDAP slapd and removing/
rewriting every critical use of malloc, and still seeing performance
hotspots in the profiles, it became apparent that we needed to see
what malloc itself was doing. This investigation brought other
malloc implementations to our attention. So for the curious, here's
some data from benchmarking glibc's malloc vs Hoard, Umem, and
Google's tcmalloc. Some of the results may surprise you.
Click the image to download the raw data as an OpenOffice spreadsheet.
Each library was tested both in single and multi-threaded operation on
an identical database. Some relevant discussions were posted on
the OpenLDAP Developer's mailing list in August and November of 2006.
-- hyc 2006-11-22