[boost] [allocators] Article and library about allocator improvements

From: Ion Gaztañaga (igaztanaga_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-22 14:13:27

Hi,

While developing of Interprocess, I started to think about optimizations 
for STL-like allocators. I even wrote a proposal about some new features 
for standard containers (N2045, 
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n2045.html) that 
was not received with much interest by the committee.

I refined those improvements for shared memory containers and I measured 
performance benefits when containers take advantage of more advanced 
allocators.

The last few months, I've taken another step forward and I've developed 
a small Boost library based on a modified DLmalloc code. I've developed 
some allocators above the modified DLmalloc and I've measured the 
performance benefits that can be obtained with optimized allocators that 
offer some new features like buffer expansion, burst allocation, etc... 
Test were performed using Interprocess containers, but instead of shared 
memory allocators, I've compared DLmalloc based heap allocators against 
the standard std::allocator<>.

I've written a long article with my explanations and conclusions:

http://www.drivehq.com/web/igaztanaga/allocplus/

The library (includes the article) can be downloaded here:

http://www.drivehq.com/web/igaztanaga/allocplus.zip

The library has no docs (the article explains all the basics) and does 
not surely meet Boost standards. The only goal of this article, the 
library and this post is to share information with other Boost container 
authors and discuss possible improvements that maybe could be applied to 
Boost containers. If those improvements are considered interesting, it 
would be great if we could write a library with allocators and develop 
some "existing practice" with boost containers before writing a future 
proposal to improve allocators.

I plan to publish the article somewhere (supposing someone is crazy 
enough to publish it ;-) ) but first I wanted to share this with 
boosters to try to improve the article/library and know if developers 
are interested in allocator issues. Comments are welcome!

Regards,

Ion