When CPython's small block allocator was first merged in late February
2001, it allocated memory in gigantic chunks it called "arenas". These
arenas were a massive 256 KILOBYTES apiece.
This tunable parameter has not been touched in the intervening 16
years. Yet CPython's memory consumption continues to grow. By the time
a current "trunk" build of CPython reaches the REPL prompt it's already
allocated 16 arenas.
I propose we make the arena size larger. By how much? I asked Victor
to run some benchmarks with arenas of 1mb, 2mb, and 4mb. The results
with 1mb and 2mb were mixed, but his benchmarks with a 4mb arena size
showed measurable (>5%) speedups on ten benchmarks and no slowdowns.
What would be the result of making the arena size 4mb?
* CPython could no longer run on a computer where at startup it could
not allocate at least one 4mb continguous block of memory.
* CPython programs would die slightly sooner in out-of-memory conditions.
* CPython programs would use more memory. How much? Hard to say. It
depends on their allocation strategy. I suspect most of the time it
would be < 3mb additional memory. But for pathological allocation
strategies the difference could be significant. (e.g: lots of
allocs, followed by lots of frees, but the occasional object lives
forever, which means that the arena it's in can never be freed. If
1 out of ever 16 256k arenas is kept alive this way, and the objects
are spaced out precisely such that now it's 1 for every 4mb arena,
max memory use would be the same but later stable memory use would
hypothetically be 16x current)
* Many programs would be slightly faster now and then, simply because
we call malloc() 1/16 as often.
What say you? Vote for your favorite color of bikeshed now!
//arry/
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