Home/ Questions/Q 730855
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T06:57:34+00:00

I am currently evaluating a few of scalable memory allocators, namely nedmalloc and ptmalloc

  • 0

I am currently evaluating a few of scalable memory allocators, namely nedmalloc and ptmalloc (both built on top of dlmalloc), as a replacement for default malloc / new because of significant contention seen in multithreaded environment. Their published performance seems to be good, however I would like to check what are experiences of other people who have really used them.

  • Were your performance goals satisfied?
  • Did you experience any unexpected or hard to solve issues (like heap corruption)?
  • If you have tried both ptmaalloc and nedmalloc, which of the two would you recommend? Why (ease of use, performance)?
  • Or perhaps you would recommend another scalable allocator (free with a permissible license preferred)?
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I have implemented NedMalloc into our application and I am quite content with the results. The contention I have seen before was gone, and the allocator was quite easy to plug in, even the general performance was very good, up to the point the overhead of memory allocations is out application is now close to unmesurable.

    I did not try the ptmalloc, as I did not find a Windows ready version of it and I lost motivation once NedMalloc worked fine for me.

    Besides of the two mentioned, I think it could be also interesting to try TCMalloc – it has some features which sound better then NedMalloc in theory (like very little overhead for small allocations, compared to 4 B header used by NedMalloc), however as it does not seem to have Windows port ready, it might also turn to be not exactly easy.

    After a few weeks of using NedMalloc I was forced to abandon it, because its space overhead has proven to be too high for us. What hit us in particular was NedMalloc seems to be reclaiming the memory it is no longer used to the OS in a bad manner, keeping most of it still committed. For now I have replaced it with JEMalloc, which seems to be not that fast (it is still fast, but not as fast as NedMalloc was), but it is very robust in this manner and its scalability is also very good.

    And after a few months of using JEMalloc I haved switched to TCMalloc. It took more effort to adapt it for Windows compared to the other ones, but its results (both performance and fragmentation) seem to be the best for us of what I have tested so far.

    • 0