[Boost-users] Boost regex multi-processor scalability and user-defined allocators

From: Roy Emek (r_emek_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-08-21 17:22:02

I’m using boost-regex library, and I’m running
into multi-threading scalability issues. When tested
on a machine with several CPUs, my performance tests
show improvement of about 60-70% when moving from a
single thread to 2 threads. 

Question 1: Is anyone aware of this problem? Is there
a known solution?

>From some testing we’ve done, it seems that the
cause of the scalability issue is problematic
implementation of std:allocator. This is a known issue
on some operating systems (e.g., Solaris 8). Some of
the boost::regex classes (e.g., match_results) accept
a user-defined allocator. However, as far as I can
understand there’s no way to completely override the
use of std::allocator. 

Question 2: is there a way to completely prevent boost
/ regex from using std::allocator? If no, can such a
capability be added?

(One solution to this problem would be global
overriding the ‘new’ and ‘delete’ operators
– but for various reasons this cannot be done in the
application I’m developing). 

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