[boost] [serialization] Performance issues serializing lots of objects

From: Adrien Gervaise (adrien.gervaise_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-08-18 03:00:04

Hi !

We've been successfully using the boost serialization library on various  
industrial projects.
One one occasion though, we had to make a modification in the source code  
in order to improve the performance of
the process :

The library uses a set (in basic_oarchive.cpp) to keep track of the  
serialized objects. In our project, a very high
number of relatively small objects are serialized through pointers and  
references to each other, and the number of
elements in the set could rocket to several millions. This led to memory  
fragmentation and very high performance
hits after the first serialization (on a Windows XP platform at least).
We just added a boost::fast_pool_allocator on the set of serialized  
pointers. The set is cleared in the destructor
of the archive, after which release_memory() is called on the pool.
This simple patch could reduce the time to perform a whole save from  
several minutes to a few seconds.

Best regards,

-- 
Adrien Gervaise
MasaGroup SCI