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[Python-Dev] int/float freelists vs pymalloc

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Feb 8 08:21:05 CET 2008 
> One of the hopes of having a custom allocator for Python was to be
> able to get rid off all free lists. For some reason that never happened.
> Not sure why. People were probably too busy with adding new
> features to the language at the time ;-)

Probably not. It's more that the free lists still outperformed pymalloc.

> Something you could try to make PyMalloc perform better for the builtin
> types is to check the actual size of the allocated PyObjects and then
> make sure that PyMalloc uses arenas large enough to hold a good quantity
> of them, e.g. it's possible that the float types fall into the same
> arena as some other type and thus don't have enough "room" to use
> as free list.

I don't think any improvements can be gained here. PyMalloc carves
out pools of 4096 bytes from an arena when it runs out of blocks
for a certain size class, and then keeps a linked list of pools of
the same size class. So when many float objects get allocated,
you'll have a lot of pools of the float type's size class.
IOW, PyMalloc has always enough room.

Regards,
Martin
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