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[Python-Dev] The untuned tunable parameter ARENA_SIZE

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Jun 3 06:07:06 EDT 2017 
On Fri, 2 Jun 2017 12:31:19 -0700
Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:
> 
> Anyway, I'm not super excited by the prospect of using obmalloc for 
> larger objects.  There's an inverse relation between the size of 
> allocation and the frequency of allocation.  In Python there are lots of 
> tiny allocations, but fewer and fewer as the size increases.  (A 
> similarly-shaped graph to what retailers call the "long tail".)  By no 
> small coincidence, obmalloc is great at small objects, which is where we 
> needed the help most.  Let's leave it at that.

+1 to that and nice explanation.

> A more fruitful endeavor might be to try one of these fancy new 
> third-party allocators in CPython, e.g. tcmalloc, jemalloc.  Try each 
> with both obmalloc turned on and turned off, and see what happens to 
> performance and memory usage.  (I'd try it myself, but I'm already so 
> far behind on watching funny cat videos.)

We should lobby for a ban on funny cat videos so that you spend more
time on CPython.

Regards

Antoine.
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