Looking at the thread counts in our services, jemalloc's background thread
is useful, but mostly idle. Add a config option to tune down the number of threads.
"always" marks all user mappings as MADV_HUGEPAGE; while "never" marks all
mappings as MADV_NOHUGEPAGE. The default setting "default" does not change any
settings. Note that all the madvise calls are part of the default extent hooks
by design, so that customized extent hooks have complete control over the
mappings including hugepage settings.
The arena-associated stats are now all prefixed with arena_stats_, and live in
their own file. Likewise, malloc_bin_stats_t -> bin_stats_t, also in its own
file.
When allocating from dirty extents (which we always prefer if available), large
active extents can get split even if the new allocation is much smaller, in
which case the introduced fragmentation causes high long term damage. This new
option controls the threshold to reuse and split an existing active extent. We
avoid using a large extent for much smaller sizes, in order to reduce
fragmentation. In some workload, adding the threshold improves virtual memory
usage by >10x.
This option controls the max size when grow_retained. This is useful when we
have customized extent hooks reserving physical memory (e.g. 1G huge pages).
Without this feature, the default increasing sequence could result in fragmented
and wasted physical memory.
To avoid the high RSS caused by THP + low usage arena (i.e. THP becomes a
significant percentage), added a new "auto" option which will only start using
THP after a base allocator used up the first THP region. Starting from the
second hugepage (in a single arena), "auto" behaves the same as "always",
i.e. madvise hugepage right away.
To avoid complications, avoid invoking pthread_create "internally", instead rely
on thread0 to launch new threads, and also terminating threads when asked.
Avoid holding arenas_lock and background_thread_lock when creating background
threads, because pthread_create may take internal locks, and potentially cause
deadlock with jemalloc internal locks.
Added opt.background_thread to enable background threads, which handles purging
currently. When enabled, decay ticks will not trigger purging (which will be
left to the background threads). We limit the max number of threads to NCPUs.
When percpu arena is enabled, set CPU affinity for the background threads as
well.
The sleep interval of background threads is dynamic and determined by computing
number of pages to purge in the future (based on backlog).
This lets us specify whether and how mutexes of the same rank are allowed to be
acquired. Currently, we only allow two polices (only a single mutex at a given
rank at a time, and mutexes acquired in ascending order), but we can plausibly
allow more (e.g. the "release uncontended mutexes before blocking").
Support millisecond resolution for decay times. Among other use cases
this makes it possible to specify a short initial dirty-->muzzy decay
phase, followed by a longer muzzy-->clean decay phase.
This resolves#812.
Control use of munmap(2) via a run-time option rather than a
compile-time option (with the same per platform default). The old
behavior of --disable-munmap can be achieved with
--with-malloc-conf=munmap:false.
This partially resolves#580.
Simplify configuration by removing the --disable-tcache option, but
replace the testing for that configuration with
--with-malloc-conf=tcache:false.
Fix the thread.arena and thread.tcache.flush mallctls to work correctly
if tcache is disabled.
This partially resolves#580.
Tracking extents is required by arena_reset. To support this, the extent
linkage was used for tracking 1) large allocations, and 2) full slabs. However
modifying the extent linkage could be an expensive operation as it likely incurs
cache misses. Since we forbid arena_reset on auto arenas, let's bypass the
linkage operations for auto arenas.
Rather than using a LIFO queue to track available extent_t structures,
use a red-black tree, and always choose the oldest/lowest available
during reuse.
