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jemalloc

Posted Mar 13, 2008 7:02 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: jemalloc by tialaramex
Parent article: A look at memory usage in Firefox 3

If your application is important enough to warrant writing or maintaining your own allocator, as has effectively happened with jemalloc in Firefox

No that's not what happened: jemalloc was written for FreeBSD (where it is the default in 7.0 and up), and ported to firefox with the help of the author, Jason Evans.

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jemalloc

Posted Mar 13, 2008 14:31 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

To quote the article, It was a huge effort resulting in Jason doubling the number of lines of
code in jemalloc over a 2 month period

If Stuart is misdescribing the situation, argue with him, not me.

jemalloc

Posted Mar 13, 2008 14:52 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

... and for the avoidance of doubt, I didn't intend to hide Jason's credit or imply that
Mozilla.org people are doing all the hard work, but only that this sort of thing doesn't come
free. Firefox developers decided that it was worth it, but for most Free Software projects,
it's going to make sense to use the system allocator unless it's absolutely dire.