https://github.com/daanx/mimalloc-bench

Suite for benchmarking malloc implementations.
https://github.com/daanx/mimalloc-bench

Last synced: 6 months ago
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Suite for benchmarking malloc implementations.

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/daanx/mimalloc-bench
• Owner: daanx
• License: mit
• Created: 2019-06-18T16:09:59.000Z (over 6 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2025-05-08T09:57:37.000Z (6 months ago)
• Last Synced: 2025-05-13T14:09:31.189Z (6 months ago)
• Language: C
• Size: 769 KB
• Stars: 419
• Watchers: 13
• Forks: 59
• Open Issues: 33
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

          


# Mimalloc-bench

 

Suite for benchmarking malloc implementations, originally

developed for benchmarking [`mimalloc`](https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc).

Collection of various benchmarks from the academic literature, together with

automated scripts to pull specific versions of benchmark programs and

allocators from Github and build them.

Due to the large variance in programs and allocators, the suite is currently

only developed for Unix-like systems, and specifically Ubuntu with `apt-get`, Fedora with `dnf`,

and macOS (for a limited set of allocators and benchmarks).

The only system-installed allocator used is glibc's implementation that ships as part of Linux's libc.

All other allocators are downloaded and built as part of `build-bench-env.sh` --

if you are looking to run these benchmarks on a different Linux distribution look at

the `setup_packages` function to see the packages required to build the full set of

allocators.

It is quite easy to add new benchmarks and allocator implementations --

please do so!.

Enjoy,

  Daan

Note that all the code in the `bench` directory is not part of

_mimalloc-bench_ as such, and all programs in the `bench` directory are

governed under their own specific licenses and copyrights as detailed in

their `README.md` (or `license.txt`) files. They are just included here for convenience.

# Benchmarking

The `build-bench-env.sh` script with the `all` argument will automatically pull

all needed benchmarks and allocators and build them in the `extern` directory:

```

~/dev/mimalloc-bench> ./build-bench-env.sh all

```

It starts installing packages and you will need to enter the sudo password.

All other programs are build in the `mimalloc-bench/extern` directory.

Use `./build-bench-env.sh -h` to see all options.

If everything succeeded, you can run the full benchmark suite (from `out/bench`) as:

- `~/dev/mimalloc-bench> cd out/bench`

- `~/dev/mimalloc-bench/out/bench>../../bench.sh alla allt`

Or just test _mimalloc_ and _tcmalloc_ on _cfrac_ and _larson_ with 16 threads:

- `~/dev/mimalloc-bench/out/bench>../../bench.sh --procs=16 mi tc cfrac larson`

Generally, you can specify the allocators (`mi`, `je`,

`tc`, `hd`, `sys` (system allocator)) etc, and the benchmarks

, `cfrac`, `espresso`, `barnes`, `lean`, `larson`, `alloc-test`, `cscratch`, etc.

Or all allocators (`alla`) and tests (`allt`).

Use `--procs=` to set the concurrency, and use `--help` to see all supported

allocators and benchmarks.

## Current Allocators

Supported allocators are as follow, see

[build-bench-env.sh](https://github.com/daanx/mimalloc-bench/blob/master/build-bench-env.sh)

for the versions:

- **dieharder**: The [_DieHarder_](https://github.com/emeryberger/DieHard)

  allocator is an error-resistant memory allocator for Windows, Linux, and Mac

  OS X.

- **ff**: [ffmalloc](https://github.com/bwickman97/ffmalloc), from the Usenix

  Security 21 [paper](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/wickman)

- **fg**: The [_FreeGuard_](https://github.com/UTSASRG/FreeGuard) allocator, from

  the CCS 17 [paper](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133956.3133957)

- **gd**: The [_Guarder_](https://github.com/UTSASRG/Guarder) allocator

  is a tunable secure allocator by the UTSA.

- **hd**: The [_Hoard_](https://github.com/emeryberger/Hoard) allocator by

  Emery Berger \[1]. This is one of the first multi-thread scalable allocators.

- **hm**: The [_Hardened

  Malloc_](https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc) from GrapheneOS,

  security-focused.

- **iso**: The [_Isoalloc_](https://github.com/struct/isoalloc/) allocator,

  isolation-based aiming at providing a reasonable level of security without

  sacrificing too much the performances.

- **je**: The [_jemalloc_](https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc)

  allocator by [Jason Evans](https://github.com/jasone),

  now developed at Facebook

  and widely used in practice, for example in FreeBSD and Firefox.

- **lf**: The [_lockfree-malloc_](https://github.com/Begun/lockfree-malloc) allocator,

  multi-thread scalability-focused.

- **lp**: The [_libpas_](https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/Source/bmalloc/libpas)

  allocator, used by [WebKit](https://webkit.org).

- **lt**: The [_ltalloc_](https://github.com/r-lyeh-archived/ltalloc) allocator,

  a multi-threaded memory allocator based on free lists best suited for many small allocations.

- **mesh**: The [_mesh_](https://github.com/plasma-umass/mesh) allocator, a

  memory allocator that automatically reduces the memory footprint of C/C++

  applications. Also tested as **nomesh** with the meshing feature disabled.

- **mi**: The [_mimalloc_](https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc) allocator.

  We can also test the debug version as **dmi** (this can be used to check for

  any bugs in the benchmarks), and the secure version as **smi**.

- **mng**: [musl](https://musl.libc.org)'s memory allocator.

- **pa**: The [_PartitionAlloc_](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/allocator/partition_allocator.git/+/refs/heads/main/PartitionAlloc.md) allocator used in Chromium.

- **rp**: The [_rpmalloc_](https://github.com/mjansson/rpmalloc) allocator uses

  16-byte aligned allocations and is developed by [Mattias

  Jansson](https://twitter.com/maniccoder) at Epic Games, used for example

  in [Haiku](https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=7132b79eafd69cced14f028f227936b9eca4de48).

- **sc**: The [_scalloc_](https://github.com/cksystemsgroup/scalloc) allocator,

  a fast, multicore-scalable, low-fragmentation memory allocator 

- **scudo**: The

  [_scudo_](https://www.llvm.org/docs/ScudoHardenedAllocator.html) allocator

  used by Fuschia and Android.

- **sg**: The [slimguard](https://github.com/ssrg-vt/SlimGuard) allocator,

  designed to be secure and memory-efficient.

- **sm**: The [_Supermalloc_](https://github.com/kuszmaul/SuperMalloc)

  allocator by Bradley Kuszmaul uses hardware transactional memory to speed up

  parallel operations.

- **sn**: The [_snmalloc_](https://github.com/microsoft/snmalloc) allocator

  is a recent concurrent message passing

  allocator by Liétar et al. \[8].

- **tbb**: The Intel [TBB](https://github.com/intel/tbb) allocator that comes

  with the Thread Building Blocks (TBB) library \[7].

- **tc**: The [_tcmalloc_](https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools)

  allocator which comes as part of the Google performance tools,

  now maintained by the commuity.

- **tcg**: The [_tcmalloc_](https://github.com/google/tcmalloc)

  allocator, maintained and [used](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/trading-off-malloc-costs-and-fleet-efficiency)

  by Google.

- **yal**: The [_yalloc_](https://github.com/jorisgeer/yalloc) yet another allocator aims at balancing safety and compactness.

- **sys**: The system allocator. Here we usually use the _glibc_ allocator

  (which is originally based on _Ptmalloc2_).

## Current Benchmarks

The first set of benchmarks are real world programs, or are trying to mimic

some, and consists of:

- __barnes__: a hierarchical n-body particle solver \[4], simulating the

  gravitational forces between 163840 particles. It uses relatively few

  allocations compared to `cfrac` and `espresso` but is multithreaded.

- __cfrac__: by Dave Barrett, implementation of continued fraction

  factorization, using many small short-lived allocations.

- __espresso__: a programmable logic array analyzer, described by

  Grunwald, Zorn, and Henderson \[3]. in the context of cache aware memory allocation.

- __gs__: have [ghostscript](https://www.ghostscript.com) process the entire

  Intel Software Developer’s Manual PDF, which is around 5000 pages.

- __leanN__:  The [Lean](https://github.com/leanprover/lean) compiler by

  de Moura _et al_, version 3.4.1,

  compiling its own standard library concurrently using N threads

  (`./lean --make -j N`). Big real-world workload with intensive

  allocations.

- __redis__: running [redis-benchmark](https://redis.io/topics/benchmarks),

  with 1 million requests pushing 10 new list elements and then requesting the

  head 10 elements, and measures the requests handled per second. Simulates a

  real-world workload.

- __larsonN__: by Larson and Krishnan \[2]. Simulates a server workload using 100 separate

   threads which each allocate and free many objects but leave some

   objects to be freed by other threads. Larson and Krishnan observe this

   behavior (which they call _bleeding_) in actual server applications,

   and the benchmark simulates this.

- __larsonN-sized__: same as the __larsonN__ except it uses sized deallocation calls which

   have a fast path in some allocators. 

- __lua__: compiling the [lua interpreter](https://github.com/lua/lua).

- __z3__: perform some computations in [z3](https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3).

The second set of benchmarks are stress tests and consist of:

- __alloc-test__: a modern allocator test developed by

  OLogN Technologies AG ([ITHare.com](http://ithare.com/testing-memory-allocators-ptmalloc2-tcmalloc-hoard-jemalloc-while-trying-to-simulate-real-world-loads/))

  Simulates intensive allocation workloads with a Pareto size

  distribution. The _alloc-testN_ benchmark runs on N cores doing

  100·10⁶ allocations per thread with objects up to 1KiB

  in size. Using commit `94f6cb`

  ([master](https://github.com/node-dot-cpp/alloc-test), 2018-07-04)

- __cache-scratch__: by Emery Berger \[1]. Introduced with the

  [Hoard](https://github.com/emeryberger/Hoard) allocator to test for

  _passive-false_ sharing of cache lines: first some small objects are

  allocated and given to each thread; the threads free that object and allocate

  immediately another one, and access that repeatedly. If an allocator

  allocates objects from different threads close to each other this will lead

  to cache-line contention.

- __cache_trash__: part of [Hoard](https://github.com/emeryberger/Hoard)

  benchmarking suite, designed to exercise heap cache locality.

- __glibc-simple__ and __glibc-thread__: benchmarks for the [glibc](https://github.com/bminor/glibc/tree/master/benchtests).

- __malloc-large__: part of mimalloc benchmarking suite, designed

  to exercice large (several MiB) allocations.

- __mleak__: check that terminate threads don't "leak" memory.

- __rptest__: modified version of the [rpmalloc-benchmark](https://github.com/mjansson/rpmalloc-benchmark) suite.

- __mstress__: simulates real-world server-like allocation patterns, using N threads with with allocations in powers of 2  

  where objects can migrate between threads and some have long life times. Not all threads have equal workloads and 

  after each phase all threads are destroyed and new threads created where some objects survive between phases.

- __rbstress__: modified version of [allocator_bench](https://github.com/SamSaffron/allocator_bench),

  allocates chunks in memory via ruby shenanigans.

- __sh6bench__: by [MicroQuill](http://www.microquill.com) as part of

  [SmartHeap](http://www.microquill.com/smartheap/sh_tspec.htm). Stress test

  where some of the objects are freed in a usual last-allocated, first-freed

  (LIFO) order, but others are freed in reverse order. Using the public

  [source](http://www.microquill.com/smartheap/shbench/bench.zip) (retrieved

  2019-01-02)

- __sh8benchN__: by [MicroQuill](http://www.microquill.com) as part of

  [SmartHeap](http://www.microquill.com/smartheap/sh_tspec.htm). Stress test

  for multi-threaded allocation (with N threads) where, just as in _larson_,

  some objects are freed by other threads, and some objects freed in reverse

  (as in _sh6bench_). Using the public

  [source](http://www.microquill.com/smartheap/SH8BENCH.zip) (retrieved

  2019-01-02)

- __xmalloc-testN__: by Lever and Boreham \[5] and Christian Eder. We use the

  updated version from the

  [SuperMalloc](https://github.com/kuszmaul/SuperMalloc) repository. This is a

  more extreme version of the _larson_ benchmark with 100 purely allocating

  threads, and 100 purely deallocating threads with objects of various sizes

  migrating between them. This asymmetric producer/consumer pattern is usually

  difficult to handle by allocators with thread-local caches.

Finally, there is a

[security benchmark](https://github.com/daanx/mimalloc-bench/tree/master/bench/security)

aiming at checking basic security properties of allocators.

## Example

Below is an example (Apr 2019) of the benchmark results on an HP

Z4-G4 workstation with a 4-core Intel® Xeon® W2123 at 3.6 GHz with 16GB

ECC memory, running Ubuntu 18.04.1 with LibC 2.27 and GCC 7.3.0.

![bench-z4-1](doc/bench-z4-1.svg)

![bench-z4-2](doc/bench-z4-2.svg)

Memory usage:

![bench-z4-rss-1](doc/bench-z4-rss-1.svg)

![bench-z4-rss-2](doc/bench-z4-rss-2.svg)

(note: the _xmalloc-testN_ memory usage should be disregarded is it

allocates more the faster the program runs. Unfortunately,

there are no entries for _SuperMalloc_ in the _leanN_ and _xmalloc-testN_

benchmarks as it faulted on those)

# Results and notable usages

## Improvements

- [Minor performances improvement](https://github.com/struct/isoalloc/commit/049c12e4c2ad5c21a768f7f3873d84bf1106646a) in isoalloc

- [Parallel compilation](https://github.com/emeryberger/DieHard/issues/15) support in DieHarder

- [Portability improvement](https://github.com/oneapi-src/oneTBB/pull/764) in Intel TBB malloc

- [Various](https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/issues/155) [portability](https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/issues/128)

  [improvements]( https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/issues/125 ) [in](https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/issues/179) Google's tcmalloc

- [Improved double-free detection]( https://github.com/microsoft/snmalloc/pull/550 ) in snmalloc

- [Fixed compilation on modern glibc]( https://github.com/ssrg-vt/SlimGuard/pull/13 ) in SlimGuard

- A [crash]( https://github.com/struct/isoalloc/issues/56 ) in isoalloc

- Caught a [compilation issue](https://github.com/mjansson/rpmalloc/issues/263) in rpmalloc

- [Portability issues](https://github.com/mjansson/rpmalloc/issues/293) in rpmalloc

## Notable usages

- Provided [data]( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/1079#note_1627978 ) for the glib allocator.

- Provided [data]( https://github.com/microsoft/snmalloc/pull/587#issuecomment-1442077886 ) for snmalloc hardening.

- Used as main benchmark suite by [S2malloc: Statistically Secure Allocator for Use-After-Free Protection And More](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01894) by Ruizhe Wang, Meng Xu and N. Asokan

# References

- \[1] Emery D. Berger, Kathryn S. McKinley, Robert D. Blumofe, and Paul R. Wilson.

   _Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications_

   the Ninth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS-IX). Cambridge, MA, November 2000.

   [pdf](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/papers/asplos-2000.pdf)

- \[2] P. Larson and M. Krishnan. _Memory allocation for long-running server applications_. In ISMM, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1998.

      [pdf](http://citeseemi.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=5F0BFB4F57832AEB6C11BF8257271088?doi=10.1.1.45.1947&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

- \[3] D. Grunwald, B. Zorn, and R. Henderson.

  _Improving the cache locality of memory allocation_. In R. Cartwright, editor,

  Proceedings of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 177–186, New York, NY, USA, June 1993.

  [pdf](http://citeseemi.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.43.6621&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

- \[4] J. Barnes and P. Hut. _A hierarchical O(n*log(n)) force-calculation algorithm_. Nature, 324:446-449, 1986.

- \[5] C. Lever, and D. Boreham. _Malloc() Performance in a Multithreaded Linux Environment._

  In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Freenix Session. San Diego, CA. Jun. 2000.

  Available at 

- \[6] Timothy Crundal. _Reducing Active-False Sharing in TCMalloc._

   2016. . CS16S1 project at the Australian National University.

- \[7] Alexey Kukanov, and Michael J Voss.

   _The Foundations for Scalable Multi-Core Software in Intel Threading Building Blocks._

   Intel Technology Journal 11 (4). 2007

- \[8] Paul Liétar, Theodore Butler, Sylvan Clebsch, Sophia Drossopoulou, Juliana Franco, Matthew J Parkinson,

  Alex Shamis, Christoph M Wintersteiger, and David Chisnall.

  _Snmalloc: A Message Passing Allocator._

  In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, 122–135. ACM. 2019.