From: "sam.saffron (Sam Saffron)" Date: 2013-11-15T16:16:59+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:58362] [ruby-trunk - Feature #9113] Ship Ruby for Linux with jemalloc out-of-the-box Issue #9113 has been updated by sam.saffron (Sam Saffron). @martin this is a great "oldish" article by facebook about this http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scalable-memory-allocation-using-jemalloc/480222803919 @nobu I guess my suggestion here is to include jemalloc source in the the repo, and compile on demand for linux (by default with an option to opt-out) that way everyone will pick this change up and it becomes "officially blessed" allocator. At Github @tmm1 has been using tcmalloc for years now, fragmentation is less good than jemalloc (tmm1 said perf is better, but I think its time to re-test cause I found jemalloc to perform better) Regardless, libc allocator is a problem and default compiles should not use it. ---------------------------------------- Feature #9113: Ship Ruby for Linux with jemalloc out-of-the-box https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9113#change-42959 Author: sam.saffron (Sam Saffron) Status: Third Party's Issue Priority: Normal Assignee: Category: build Target version: 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. -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/