Web Apocrypha

After I benchmarked JavaScriptCore with our new participant called DLmalloc, it has been suggested to test it with QtLauncher also. I compiled DLmalloc in thread-safe mode (USE_LOCKS=1), so it became capable to serve WebCore's memory requests. Perhaps, another solution could have been to turn off every use of threads in QtLauncher/WebCore, but I think this would be a lucky approach...
I did the benchmarking on an x86 Debian-Lenny (SMP kernel, dual core 2.33GHz CPU), I used the Linux-Qt port of WebKit with the official r55365 revision. The memory results are provided by our patched linux kernel and they represent maximum resident set size (RSS).

Methanol

Methanol is our WebCore page rendering/painting benchmark which uses QtLauncher. It loads and renders web pages one by one (currently, 9 pages, 5 times). It measures the time with JavaScript.
As the chart shows, DLmalloc overtakes system allocator and JEmalloc, but TCmalloc is faster by 4.7%. On the memory consumption side, the chart shows exactly the inverse of the performance chart: TCmalloc consumes the most memory and JEmalloc the least. DLmalloc consumes less memory than TCmalloc by 3.9%, but this is only ~2.3 megabytes.

SunSpider in QtLauncher

This test runs SunSpider benchmark inside a web page, but otherwise it contains exactly the same tests which are located in the trunk/SunSpider directory of WebKit. From the view of performance, the charts of the SunSpider benchmark don't show significant differences between the allocators, but in this case DLmalloc is the fastest and it consumes the least memory, which means it is better than TCmalloc by 14.3%.

V8 in QtLauncher

In the case of V8 benchmark suite, TCmalloc is the fastest allocator again, but on the other side, it consumes the most memory. Compared to DLmalloc, TCmalloc is faster by 3.9% and consumes more memory by 4.8%.

WindScorpion in QtLauncher

WindScorpion is our real life JavaScript application collection. It emphasizes TCmalloc's performance advantage... TCmalloc is faster than DLmalloc by 10%, but on the other side, it consumes 7% more memory.

Summary

I tried every important benchmark with our new participant (DLmalloc), but it seems that in most cases, TCmalloc provides still the best performance results.

I found a fancy promising multi-threaded C++ based allocator called Hoard, in my next post I'll write about it's results.