[Python-Dev] Modify PyMem_Malloc to use pymalloc for performance

[Victor Stinner]

> There is an old discussion about the performance of PyMem_Malloc() memory allocator.

Oops, I forgot to mention that my patch is a follow-up of a previous
patch showing nice speedup on dict:
http://bugs.python.org/issue23601
(but I said it in my issue ;-))

Well, see http://bugs.python.org/issue26249 for the longer context.


2016-02-03 22:03 GMT+01:00 Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com>:
> Does anyone recall the rationale to have two families to memory allocators?

I asked Mercurial, and I found the change addind PyMem_Malloc():
---
branch:      legacy-trunk
user:        Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
date:        Tue Aug 05 01:59:22 1997 +0000
files:       Include/mymalloc.h
description:
Added Py_Malloc and friends as well as PyMem_Malloc and friends.
---

As expected, it's old, as the change adding PyObject_Malloc():
---
changeset:   12576:1c7c2dd1beb1
branch:      legacy-trunk
user:        Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
date:        Wed May 03 23:44:39 2000 +0000
files:       Include/mymalloc.h Include/objimpl.h
Modules/_cursesmodule.c Modules/_sre.c Modules/_tkinter.c
Modules/almodule.c Modules/arraymodule.c Modules/bsddbmodule.
description:
Vladimir Marangozov's long-awaited malloc restructuring.
For more comments, read the patches at python.org archives.
For documentation read the comments in mymalloc.h and objimpl.h.

(This is not exactly what Vladimir posted to the patches list; I've
made a few changes, and Vladimir sent me a fix in private email for a
problem that only occurs in debug mode.  I'm also holding back on his
change to main.c, which seems unnecessary to me.)
---

Victor