alt Hacker NewsIf your algorithm does a ton of small allocations to the point where the allocator is the bottleneck, you're already doing it wrong. The allocator necessarily comes with a lot of overhead because it needs to accommodate diverse use cases, avoid fragmentation, and ideally, implement a variety of security checks. If you're doing something alloc-intensive, you're probably allocating and freeing a lot of identical structures and you'd be better off grabbing some continuous memory and managing that yourself in a task-specific way.
But the reality is that almost no one actually cares about performance because compute is cheaper than expertise and labor, at least in the short haul. Everything is getting more bloated and slower and we just compensate by adding CPU cores, gigabytes and gigahertz.
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That's an interesting viewpoint, but then, will the allocator's performance never matter for any use case that is not "wrong"? It doesn't feel right.
"But the reality is that almost no one actually cares about performance because compute is cheaper than expertise and labor, at least in the short haul."
Doesn't have to stay that way, with hardware prices soaring and development cost allegedly in free fall.
No, musl's allocator is just bad even in completely normal programs, and it is especially awful if you are using even two threads much less a lot of them. It has no TLABs or arenas. It has a single global mutex over alloc/free paths. It does syscalls underneath that lock (mmap) meaning the few fast paths it has are rarely taken under contention and have to fall back to futex wakes, so even 2 threads with minor contention and allocation rate will have visible wait points in profiles, stuck waiting for the allocator. It returns mapped memory to the OS very eagerly when a size class is empty, so even single allocs followed by a single free can cause thrashing as it mmaps/unmmaps things repeatedly for a size class over and over. Etc. You quite literally have to limit your thread count when using musl, because it will tank the performance of actually highly threaded programs that can scale with core count, even at very modest allocation rates and small working set sizes.
Its string routines and memory copy routines are also similarly bad, as the article alludes to. They are just naive loops with nearly no optimization. These are not small insignificant functions where using them is "doing it wrong", they are the backbone of vast amounts of code and can be made multiple times faster. You can similarly see string routines pop up in profiles all the time in musl builds in my experience. And unlike the memory allocator these cannot be "fixed" systematically across the application at link time, so you are stuck with it.
Real programs have to often do things like allocate memory and use multiple threads and process strings. People have been optimizing these things for decades, there is vast amounts of prior art, the musl developers simply did not do so because they prioritize simplicity over nearly everything else (from what I can tell) including performance.