[Python-Dev] pymalloc killer (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Fri, 29 Mar 2002 19:11:13 -0500

[martin@v.loewis.de]

... The pool in question and the arena it belongs to may have different starting addresses (in 63 of 64 cases, they will be different).

Currently, they always have different addresses, as at least the first 4 bytes of an arena are used to link arenas together. If we save the arena base addresses in a vector instead, the link becomes unnecessary (well, it's not actually used for anything now anyway), and then the arena-rounding logic can be changed so that the first pool can coincide with the arena start if malloc just happens to return a page-aligned address for the arena (as the code is now, in that case the entire first page is devoted to holding s next-arena pointer).

Of course, you could also build the table for pool addresses, assigning pool indices - but that would require 64 times as much memory.

Bingo -- I don't want to do that.