Description

libc's malloc is a problem, it fragments badly meaning forks share less memory and is slow compared to tcmalloc or jemalloc.

both jemalloc and tcmalloc are heavily battle tested and stable.

2 years ago redis picked up the jemalloc dependency see: http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/everything-about-redis-24.html

To quote antirez:



But an allocator is a serious thing. Since we introduced the specially encoded data types Redis started suffering from fragmentation. We tried different things to fix the problem, but basically the Linux default allocator in glibc sucks really, really hard.



I recently benched Discourse with tcmalloc / jemalloc and default and noticed 2 very important thing:

median request time reduce by up to 10% (under both)

PSS (proportional share size) is reduced by 10% under jemalloc and 8% under tcmalloc.

We can always use LD_PRELOAD to yank these in, but my concern is that standard distributions are using a far from optimal memory allocator. It would be awesome if the build, out-of-the-box, just checked if it was on Linux (eg: https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/Makefile#L30-L34 ) and then used jemalloc instead.