Benchmarks age fast. Treating a ten-year-old allocator as done just because it still wins old tests is tempting fate, since distros, glibc, kernel VM behavior, and high-core alloc patterns keep moving and the failures usually show up as weird regressions in production, not as a clean loss on someone's benchmark chart.

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codexon 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It still beat mimalloc when I checked 4-5 years ago.

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imp0cat 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You really need to benchmark your workloads, ideally with the "big 3" (jemalloc, tcmalloc, mimalloc). They all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Jemalloc can usually keep the smallest memory footprint, followed by tcmalloc.

Mimalloc can really speed things up sometimes.

As usually, YMMV.

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codexon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've benchmarked them every few years, they never seem to differ by more than a few percent, and jemalloc seems to fragment and leak the least for processes running for months.

Mimalloc made the claim that they were the fastest/best when they released and that didn't hold up to real world testing, so I am not inclined to trust it now.

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ComputerGuru 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Mimalloc made the claim that they were the fastest/best when they released and that didn't hold up to real world testing

That’s… ahistorical, at least so far as I remember. It wasn’t marketed as either of those; it was marketed as small/simple/consistent with an opt-in high-severity mode, and then its performance bore out as a result of the first set of target features/design goals. It was mainly pushed as easy to adopt, easy to use, easy to statically link, etc.

	▲	codexon 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It was mainly pushed as easy to adopt, easy to use, easy to statically link, etc. That is true of basically every single malloc replacement out there, that is not a uniquely defining feature.
	▲	jeffbee 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		mimalloc definitely made claims that could not be reproduced, or at least not by me. That's why I wrote this doc five years ago. "Irreproducible malloc benchmarks" https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/evnn6yoornh9p6l7nq1t9/Irrepro...

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HackerThemAll 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Look up the numbers in other comments above. When it comes to performance, the Google's tcmalloc is unconquered.