{"id":594865,"date":"2019-06-21T08:43:05","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T15:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=594865"},"modified":"2019-06-21T08:43:05","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T15:43:05","slug":"mimalloc-free-list-sharding-in-action","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/mimalloc-free-list-sharding-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Mimalloc: Free List Sharding in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"

Modern memory allocators have to balance many simultaneous demands,
\nincluding performance, security, the presence of concurrency, and
\napplication-specific demands depending on the context of their use. One
\nincreasing use-case for allocators is as back-end implementations of
\nlanguages, such as Swift and Python, that use reference counting to
\nautomatically deallocate objects. We present mimalloc<\/em>, a memory allocator
\nthat effectively balances these demands, shows significant performance
\nadvantages over existing allocators, and is tailored to support languages
\nthat rely on the memory allocator as a backend for reference counting.
\nMimalloc combines several innovations to achieve this result. First, it
\nuses three page-local sharded free lists to increase locality, avoid
\ncontention, and support a highly-tuned allocate and free fast path. These
\nfree lists also support *temporal cadence*, which allows the allocator to
\npredictably leave the fast path for regular maintenance tasks such as
\nsupporting deferred freeing, handling frees from non-local threads, etc.
\nWhile influenced by the allocation workload of the reference-counted Lean
\nand Koka programming language, we show that mimalloc has superior
\nperformance to modern commercial memory allocators, including tcmalloc
\nand jemalloc, with speed improvements of 7% and 14%, respectively, on
\nredis, and consistently out performs over a wide range of sequential and
\nconcurrent benchmarks. Allocators tailored to provide an efficient
\nruntime for reference-counting languages reduce the implementation burden
\non developers and encourage the creation of innovative new language
\ndesigns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Modern memory allocators have to balance many simultaneous demands, including performance, security, the presence of concurrency, and application-specific demands depending on the context of their use. One increasing use-case for allocators is as back-end implementations of languages, such as Swift and Python, that use reference counting to automatically deallocate objects. We present mimalloc, a memory 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Leijen","user_id":31497,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Daan Leijen"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Ben Zorn","user_id":35154,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Ben Zorn"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Leonardo de Moura","user_id":32646,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Leonardo de Moura"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144812],"msr_project":[170943],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"techreport","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":170943,"post_title":"Koka","post_name":"koka","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2012-04-13 08:38:42","post_modified":"2021-06-18 11:46:37","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/koka\/","post_excerpt":"Koka is a strongly typed functional-style language with effect types and 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