README

bsdmalloc (for Linux)     Joe Damato   @joedamato   http://timetobleed.com 
==========================================================================


**WARNING:    bsdmalloc is  -NOT- threadsafe. Do *not* use in applications with threads.

Build it
========
% make

Then you can either link against libbsdmalloc.so (-lbsdmalloc) or preload:

% LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libbsdmalloc.so /path/to/app


What is bsdmalloc?
==================
bsdmalloc is a *fast* malloc implementation that I snagged from NetBSD. I did
some minimal porting work to get it to build on my amd64 Linux box.


Why another malloc?
===================
Different malloc implementations are good for different things. This particular
implementation is good if you don't care about multithreaded applications or
heap fragmentation. It has really fast malloc/free, though.


Simple, stupid, benchmark against glibc's malloc and tcmalloc
=============================================================
In my simple, stupid test, bsdmalloc is *quite a bit* faster than tcmalloc and 
*way* faster than glibc's malloc.

LD_PRELOAD=/home/joe/code/small_malloc/bsdmalloc/libbsdmalloc.so.1.0.1 /usr/bin/time ./test
22.42user 0.01system 0:22.48elapsed 99%CPU
 
LD_PRELOAD=/custom/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.0.0.0 /usr/bin/time ./test
36.89user 0.02system 0:37.00elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
 
/usr/bin/time ./test
78.02user 0.11system 1:18.23elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k