[issue3526] Customized malloc implementation on SunOS and AIX

[Charles-François Natali]

Charles-François Natali <neologix at free.fr> added the comment:

> Also that addresses the issue of "two threads inside different malloc implementations at the same time": it is currently not allowed with PyMem_Malloc.
>

That's not true.
You can perfectly have one thread inside PyMem_Malloc while another
one is inside libc's malloc.
For example, posix_listdir does:

     Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS
     dirp = opendir(name);
     Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS

Where opendir calls malloc internally. Since the GIL is released, you
can have another thread inside PyMem_Malloc at the same time. This is
perfectly safe, as long as the libc's malloc version is thread-safe.

But with your patch, such code wouldn't be thread-safe anymore. This
patch implies that a thread can't call malloc directly or indirectly
(printf, opendir, and many others) while it doesn't hold the GIL. This
is going to break a lot of existing code.
This thread-safety issue is not theoretical: I wrote up a small
program with two threads, one allocating/freeing memory in loop with
glibc's malloc and the other one with dlmalloc: it crashes immediately
on a Linux box.

> Most python objects will be allocated in pymalloc arenas (if they are smaller than 256 bytes) which (if compiled with --with-pymalloc-mmap) will be directly allocated by calling mmap, or (without --with-pymalloc-mmap) will be allocated in dlmalloc by calling mmap (because arenas are 256KB).
> So most of the python objects will end up in mmap segments separate from the heap.
>
> The only allocations that will end up in the heap are for the medium python objects (>256 bytes and <256KB) or for allocations directly by calling  PyMem_Malloc (and for a size <256KB).

Note that there are actually many objects falling into this category:
for example, on 64-bit, a dictionary exceeds 256B, and is thus
allocated directly from the heap (well, it changed really recently
actually), the same holds for medium-sized lists and strings. So,
depending on your workload, the heap can extend and shrink quite a
bit.

> If you are really concerned about mixing 2 malloc implementations in the heap, you can define "HAVE_MORECORE 0" in dlmalloc and that way dlmalloc will always use mmap and not use the heap at all.
>

It will also be slower, and consume more memory.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue3526>
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