Web Apocrypha

There are a lot of custom allocators in the world, so let's try another promising one, called DLmalloc. It was made by Doug Lea. I've put DLmalloc into JavaScriptCore with the help of the custom allocation framework. I tested DLmalloc only in JavaScriptCore, because it didn't work well with QtWebKit's multi-threaded features. The measurements have been made with QtWebKit, running on x86 Debian-Lenny.

 

Performance

 

 

Surprisingly, in the case of SunSpider, DLmalloc took over even TCmalloc a bit. JEmalloc is still the slowest allocator, it's 9.5% slower than DLmalloc. V8 benchmark's performance results show the same tendency as SunSpider. WindScorpion benchmark - which contains real life JavaScript applications - breaks the tendency, since TCmalloc is the fastest allocator in this case, it's even faster than DLmalloc by 3.1%.

 

Memory consumption

 

 

DLmalloc has the same memory consumption as System malloc, which means 19.6% less memory consumption compared to TCmalloc in the case of SunSpider. In the case of V8 and WindScorpion benchmarks, the System's allocator still wins, it has the lowest memory consumption and DLmalloc produces almost the same results.

 

Summary

From the view of performance, although DLmalloc is the fastest on SunSpider and V8 benchmarks, it seems to be a good alternative of TCmalloc, but the difference is not significant to TCmalloc moreover, on WindScorpion it's slower than TCmalloc. If we analyse the memory consumption, a good property of DLmalloc that it produces almost the same memory consumption like System malloc. Unfortunately, as I said, DLmalloc doesn't work well with QtWebKit's multi-threaded features, so it can't be a simple replacement of TCmalloc without further implementation work.