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Thread: [PATCH] Using mimalloc to improve performance and reduce memory allocation lock contention

[PATCH] Using mimalloc to improve performance and reduce memory allocation lock contention

From
Adrian Grucza
Date:
Hi,

We have a multi-threaded Windows application that was experiencing delays due to high lock contention in memory allocations from the PostgreSQL ODBC driver. We tried modifying the driver to use mimalloc, which is a memory allocator with better performance characteristics. After deploying this change, the delays due to lock contention disappeared. It has been running on thousands of our production deployments for 9 months without issue.

I've created this pull request so that others can benefit from this change by building the driver with the _MIMALLOC_ symbol defined and linking to the mimalloc library.

In my patch, the usage of mimalloc is off by default, so it should be safe to merge. But I'd like to get people's thoughts on whether it should be enabled by default so that people can benefit from this change without having to build the driver themselves.

Regards,
Adrian

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Re: [PATCH] Using mimalloc to improve performance and reduce memory allocation lock contention

From
Dave Cramer
Date:


On Mon, 25 Mar 2024 at 01:42, Adrian Grucza <adrian.grucza@iress.com> wrote:
Hi,

We have a multi-threaded Windows application that was experiencing delays due to high lock contention in memory allocations from the PostgreSQL ODBC driver. We tried modifying the driver to use mimalloc, which is a memory allocator with better performance characteristics. After deploying this change, the delays due to lock contention disappeared. It has been running on thousands of our production deployments for 9 months without issue.

I've created this pull request so that others can benefit from this change by building the driver with the _MIMALLOC_ symbol defined and linking to the mimalloc library.

In my patch, the usage of mimalloc is off by default, so it should be safe to merge. But I'd like to get people's thoughts on whether it should be enabled by default so that people can benefit from this change without having to build the driver themselves.

Cool, 

Thanks, I will have a look

Dave