bsdmalloc (for Linux) Joe Damato @joedamato http://timetobleed.com

**WARNING: bsdmalloc is -NOT- threadsafe. Do not use in applications with threads.

Build it

% make

Then you can either link against libbsdmalloc.so (-lbsdmalloc) or preload:

% LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libbsdmalloc.so /path/to/app

What is bsdmalloc?

bsdmalloc is a fast malloc implementation that I snagged from NetBSD. I did some minimal porting work to get it to build on my amd64 Linux box.

Why another malloc?

Different malloc implementations are good for different things. This particular implementation is good if you don't care about multithreaded applications or heap fragmentation. It has really fast malloc/free, though.

Simple, stupid, benchmark against glibc's malloc and tcmalloc

In my simple, stupid test, bsdmalloc is quite a bit faster than tcmalloc and way faster than glibc's malloc.

LD_PRELOAD=/home/joe/code/small_malloc/bsdmalloc/libbsdmalloc.so.1.0.1 /usr/bin/time ./test 22.42user 0.01system 0:22.48elapsed 99%CPU

LD_PRELOAD=/custom/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.0.0.0 /usr/bin/time ./test 36.89user 0.02system 0:37.00elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k

/usr/bin/time ./test 78.02user 0.11system 1:18.23elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k