[Python-Dev] The untuned tunable parameter ARENA_SIZE (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Jun 3 06:07:06 EDT 2017

On Fri, 2 Jun 2017 12:31:19 -0700 Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

Anyway, I'm not super excited by the prospect of using obmalloc for larger objects. There's an inverse relation between the size of allocation and the frequency of allocation. In Python there are lots of tiny allocations, but fewer and fewer as the size increases. (A similarly-shaped graph to what retailers call the "long tail".) By no small coincidence, obmalloc is great at small objects, which is where we needed the help most. Let's leave it at that.

+1 to that and nice explanation.

A more fruitful endeavor might be to try one of these fancy new third-party allocators in CPython, e.g. tcmalloc, jemalloc. Try each with both obmalloc turned on and turned off, and see what happens to performance and memory usage. (I'd try it myself, but I'm already so far behind on watching funny cat videos.)

We should lobby for a ban on funny cat videos so that you spend more time on CPython.

Regards

Antoine.

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