Mimalloc-bench

Suite for benchmarking malloc implementations, originally developed for benchmarking 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 Linux-like systems, and specifically Ubuntu with apt-get or Fedora with dnf. The only system-installed allocator used is glibc's implementation that ships as part of Linux's libc. All other allocators are downloaded + 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.

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, mc (system allocator)) etc, and the benchmarks , cfrac, espresso, barnes, lean, larson, alloc-test, cscratch, etc. Or all allocators (alla) and tests (allt). Use --procs=<n> to set the concurrency, and use --help to see all supported allocators and benchmarks.

Current Allocators

Supported allocators are:

mi: The mimalloc allocator, using version tag v1.0.0. We can also test a secure version of mimalloc as smi, and the debug version as dmi (this can be used to check for any bugs in the benchmarks).
tc: The tcmalloc allocator which comes as part of the Google performance tools and is used in the Chrome browser. Installed as package libgoogle-perftools-dev version 2.5-2.2ubuntu3.
je: The jemalloc allocator by Jason Evans is developed at Facebook and widely used in practice, for example in FreeBSD and Firefox. Using version tag 5.2.0.
sn: The snmalloc allocator is a recent concurrent message passing allocator by Liétar et al. [8]. Using git-0b64536b.
rp: The rpmalloc allocator uses 16-byte aligned allocations and is developed by Mattias Jansson at Rampant Pixels. Using version tag 1.4.0.
hd: The Hoard allocator by Emery Berger [1]. This is one of the first multi-thread scalable allocators. Using version tag 3.13.
glibc,mc: The system allocator. Here we use the glibc allocator (which is originally based on Ptmalloc2), using version 2.27.0. Note that version 2.26 significantly improved scalability over earlier versions.
sm: The Supermalloc allocator by Bradley Kuszmaul uses hardware transactional memory to speed up parallel operations. Using version git-709663fb.
tbb: The Intel TBB allocator that comes with the Thread Building Blocks (TBB) library [7]. Installed as package libtbb-dev, version 2017~U7-8.
ia: Isolation Alloc by Chris Rohlf is a general purpose allocator that primarily relies on an isolation strategy to mitigate memory safety vulnerabilities. Tests use git master.

Current Benchmarks

The first set of benchmarks are real world programs and consist of:

cfrac: by Dave Barrett, implementation of continued fraction factorization which uses many small short-lived allocations -- exactly the workload we are targeting for Koka and Lean.
espresso: a programmable logic array analyzer, described by Grunwald, Zorn, and Henderson [3]. in the context of cache aware memory allocation.
barnes: a hierarchical n-body particle solver [4] which uses relatively few allocations compared to cfrac and espresso. Simulates the gravitational forces between 163840 particles.
leanN: The 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 allocation.
redis: running the redis 5.0.3 server on 1 million requests pushing 10 new list elements and then requesting the head 10 elements. Measures the requests handled per second.
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.

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

alloc-test: a modern allocator test developed by OLogN Technologies AG (ITHare.com) Simulates intensive allocation workloads with a Pareto size distribution. The alloc-testN benchmark runs on N cores doing 100·10^6^ allocations per thread with objects up to 1KiB in size. Using commit 94f6cb (master, 2018-07-04)
sh6bench: by MicroQuill as part of SmartHeap. 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 (retrieved 2019-01-02)
sh8benchN: by MicroQuill as part of SmartHeap. 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 (retrieved 2019-01-02)
xmalloc-testN: by Lever and Boreham [5] and Christian Eder. We use the updated version from the 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.
cache-scratch: by Emery Berger [1]. Introduced with the 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.

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.

Memory usage:

(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)

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
[2] P. Larson and M. Krishnan. Memory allocation for long-running server applications. In ISMM, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1998. 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
[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 https://github.com/kuszmaul/SuperMalloc/tree/master/tests
[6] Timothy Crundal. Reducing Active-False Sharing in TCMalloc. 2016. http://courses.cecs.anu.edu.au/courses/CSPROJECTS/16S1/Reports/Timothy*Crundal*Report.pdf. 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.

struct/mimalloc-bench