Question

Is there a function (SSEx intrinsics is OK) which will fill the memory with a specified int32_t value? For instance, when this value is equal to 0xAABBCC00 the result memory should look like:

AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00
AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00
AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00
AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00AABBCC00
...

I could use std::fill or simple for-loop, but it is not fast enough.

---

Resizing of a vector performed only once in the beginning of program, this is not an issue. The bottleneck is filling the memory.

Simplified code:

struct X
{
  typedef std::vector<int32_t> int_vec_t;
  int_vec_t buffer;

  X() : buffer( 5000000 ) { /* some more action */ }
  ~X() { /* some code here */ }

  // the following function is called 25 times per second
  const int_vec_t& process( int32_t background, const SOME_DATA& data );
};

const X::int_vec_t& X::process( int32_t background, const SOME_DATA& data )
{
    // the following one string takes 30% of total time of #process function
    std::fill( buffer.begin(), buffer.end(), background );

    // some processing
    // ...

    return buffer;
}

Answer 1

Thanks to everyone for your answers. I’ve checked wj32’s solution , but it shows very similar time as std::fill do. My current solution works 4 times faster (in Visual Studio 2008) than std::fill with help of the function memcpy:

 // fill the first quarter by the usual way
 std::fill(buffer.begin(), buffer.begin() + buffer.size()/4, background);
 // copy the first quarter to the second (very fast)
 memcpy(&buffer[buffer.size()/4], &buffer[0], buffer.size()/4*sizeof(background));
 // copy the first half to the second (very fast)
 memcpy(&buffer[buffer.size()/2], &buffer[0], buffer.size()/2*sizeof(background));

In the production code one needs to add check if buffer.size() is divisible by 4 and add appropriate handling for that.