Minix Man Pages

Man Page or Keyword Search:
Man Architecture
Apropos Keyword Search (all sections) Output format
home | help
JEMALLOC(3)              BSD Library Functions Manual              JEMALLOC(3)

NAME
     jemalloc -- the default system allocator

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     const char * _malloc_options;

DESCRIPTION
     The jemalloc is a general-purpose concurrent malloc(3) implementation
     specifically designed to be scalable on modern multi-processor systems.
     It is the default user space system allocator in NetBSD.

     When the first call is made to one of the memory allocation routines such
     as malloc() or realloc(), various flags that affect the workings of the
     allocator are set or reset.  These are described below.

     The "name" of the file referenced by the symbolic link named
     /etc/malloc.conf, the value of the environment variable MALLOC_OPTIONS,
     and the string pointed to by the global variable _malloc_options will be
     interpreted, in that order, character by character as flags.

     Most flags are single letters.  Uppercase letters indicate that the
     behavior is set, or on, and lowercase letters mean that the behavior is
     not set, or off.  The following options are available.

        A     All warnings (except for the warning about unknown flags being
              set) become fatal.  The process will call abort(3) in these
              cases.

        H     Use madvise(2) when pages within a chunk are no longer in use,
              but the chunk as a whole cannot yet be deallocated.  This is
              primarily of use when swapping is a real possibility, due to the
              high overhead of the madvise() system call.

        J     Each byte of new memory allocated by malloc(), realloc() will be
              initialized to 0xa5.  All memory returned by free(), realloc()
              will be initialized to 0x5a.  This is intended for debugging and
              will impact performance negatively.

        K     Increase/decrease the virtual memory chunk size by a factor of
              two.  The default chunk size is 1 MB.  This option can be
              specified multiple times.

        N     Increase/decrease the number of arenas by a factor of two.  The
              default number of arenas is four times the number of CPUs, or
              one if there is a single CPU.  This option can be specified
              multiple times.

        P     Various statistics are printed at program exit via an atexit(3)
              function.  This has the potential to cause deadlock for a multi-
              threaded process that exits while one or more threads are
              executing in the memory allocation functions.  Therefore, this
              option should only be used with care; it is primarily intended
              as a performance tuning aid during application development.

        Q     Increase/decrease the size of the allocation quantum by a factor
              of two.  The default quantum is the minimum allowed by the
              architecture (typically 8 or 16 bytes).  This option can be
              specified multiple times.

        S     Increase/decrease the size of the maximum size class that is a
              multiple of the quantum by a factor of two.  Above this size,
              power-of-two spacing is used for size classes.  The default
              value is 512 bytes.  This option can be specified multiple
              times.

        U     Generate "utrace" entries for ktrace(1), for all operations.
              Consult the source for details on this option.

        V     Attempting to allocate zero bytes will return a NULL pointer
              instead of a valid pointer.  (The default behavior is to make a
              minimal allocation and return a pointer to it.)  This option is
              provided for System V compatibility.  This option is
              incompatible with the X option.

        X     Rather than return failure for any allocation function, display
              a diagnostic message on stderr and cause the program to drop
              core (using abort(3)).  This option should be set at compile
              time by including the following in the source code:

                    _malloc_options = "X";

        Z     Each byte of new memory allocated by malloc(), realloc() will be
              initialized to 0.  Note that this initialization only happens
              once for each byte, so realloc() does not zero memory that was
              previously allocated.  This is intended for debugging and will
              impact performance negatively.

     Extra care should be taken when enabling any of the options in production
     environments.  The A, J, and Z options are intended for testing and
     debugging.  An application which changes its behavior when these options
     are used is flawed.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
     The jemalloc allocator uses multiple arenas in order to reduce lock
     contention for threaded programs on multi-processor systems.  This works
     well with regard to threading scalability, but incurs some costs.  There
     is a small fixed per-arena overhead, and additionally, arenas manage
     memory completely independently of each other, which means a small fixed
     increase in overall memory fragmentation.  These overheads are not
     generally an issue, given the number of arenas normally used.  Note that
     using substantially more arenas than the default is not likely to improve
     performance, mainly due to reduced cache performance.  However, it may
     make sense to reduce the number of arenas if an application does not make
     much use of the allocation functions.

     Memory is conceptually broken into equal-sized chunks, where the chunk
     size is a power of two that is greater than the page size.  Chunks are
     always aligned to multiples of the chunk size.  This alignment makes it
     possible to find metadata for user objects very quickly.

     User objects are broken into three categories according to size:

        1.   Small objects are smaller than one page.

        2.   Large objects are smaller than the chunk size.

        3.   Huge objects are a multiple of the chunk size.

     Small and large objects are managed by arenas; huge objects are managed
     separately in a single data structure that is shared by all threads.
     Huge objects are used by applications infrequently enough that this
     single data structure is not a scalability issue.

     Each chunk that is managed by an arena tracks its contents in a page map
     as runs of contiguous pages (unused, backing a set of small objects, or
     backing one large object).  The combination of chunk alignment and chunk
     page maps makes it possible to determine all metadata regarding small and
     large allocations in constant time.

     Small objects are managed in groups by page runs.  Each run maintains a
     bitmap that tracks which regions are in use.  Allocation requests can be
     grouped as follows.

        +o   Allocation requests that are no more than half the quantum (see
            the Q option) are rounded up to the nearest power of two
            (typically 2, 4, or 8).

        +o   Allocation requests that are more than half the quantum, but no
            more than the maximum quantum-multiple size class (see the S
            option) are rounded up to the nearest multiple of the quantum.

        +o   Allocation requests that are larger than the maximum quantum-
            multiple size class, but no larger than one half of a page, are
            rounded up to the nearest power of two.

        +o   Allocation requests that are larger than half of a page, but small
            enough to fit in an arena-managed chunk (see the K option), are
            rounded up to the nearest run size.

        +o   Allocation requests that are too large to fit in an arena-managed
            chunk are rounded up to the nearest multiple of the chunk size.

     Allocations are packed tightly together, which can be an issue for multi-
     threaded applications.  If you need to assure that allocations do not
     suffer from cache line sharing, round your allocation requests up to the
     nearest multiple of the cache line size.

DEBUGGING
     The first thing to do is to set the A option.  This option forces a
     coredump (if possible) at the first sign of trouble, rather than the
     normal policy of trying to continue if at all possible.

     It is probably also a good idea to recompile the program with suitable
     options and symbols for debugger support.

     If the program starts to give unusual results, coredump or generally
     behave differently without emitting any of the messages mentioned in the
     next section, it is likely because it depends on the storage being filled
     with zero bytes.  Try running it with the Z option set; if that improves
     the situation, this diagnosis has been confirmed.  If the program still
     misbehaves, the likely problem is accessing memory outside the allocated
     area.

     Alternatively, if the symptoms are not easy to reproduce, setting the J
     option may help provoke the problem.  In truly difficult cases, the U
     option, if supported by the kernel, can provide a detailed trace of all
     calls made to these functions.

     Unfortunately, jemalloc does not provide much detail about the problems
     it detects; the performance impact for storing such information would be
     prohibitive.  There are a number of allocator implementations available
     on the Internet which focus on detecting and pinpointing problems by
     trading performance for extra sanity checks and detailed diagnostics.

ENVIRONMENT
     The following environment variables affect the execution of the
     allocation functions:

     MALLOC_OPTIONS  If the environment variable MALLOC_OPTIONS is set, the
                     characters it contains will be interpreted as flags to
                     the allocation functions.

EXAMPLES
     To dump core whenever a problem occurs:

           ln -s 'A' /etc/malloc.conf

     To specify in the source that a program does no return value checking on
     calls to these functions:

           _malloc_options = "X";

DIAGNOSTICS
     If any of the memory allocation/deallocation functions detect an error or
     warning condition, a message will be printed to file descriptor
     STDERR_FILENO.  Errors will result in the process dumping core.  If the A
     option is set, all warnings are treated as errors.

     The _malloc_message variable allows the programmer to override the
     function which emits the text strings forming the errors and warnings if
     for some reason the stderr file descriptor is not suitable for this.
     Please note that doing anything which tries to allocate memory in this
     function is likely to result in a crash or deadlock.

     All messages are prefixed by "<progname>: (malloc)".

SEE ALSO
     emalloc(3), malloc(3), memory(3), memoryallocators(9)

     Jason Evans, A Scalable Concurrent malloc(3) Implementation for FreeBSD,
     http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jemalloc.pdf, April
     16, 2006, BSDCan 2006.

     Poul-Henning Kamp, "Malloc(3) revisited", Proceedings of the FREENIX
     Track: 1998 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX Association,
     http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix98/freenix/kamp.pdf,
     June 15-19, 1998.

     Paul R. Wilson, Mark S. Johnstone, Michael Neely, and David Boles,
     Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review, University of
     Texas at Austin, ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/allocsrv.ps, 1995.

HISTORY
     The jemalloc allocator became the default system allocator first in
     FreeBSD 7.0 and then in NetBSD 5.0.  In both systems it replaced the
     older so-called "phkmalloc" implementation.

AUTHORS
     Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>

BSD                              June 21, 2011                             BSD

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | IMPLEMENTATION NOTES | DEBUGGING | ENVIRONMENT | EXAMPLES | DIAGNOSTICS | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS